Hull 721
by Eleventh Century Remnant
Summary: This is slightly-impure Star Wars so far, set basically between Yavin and Hoth, with some continuity deviations, mainly to do with starfighter availability and just how much an Imperial Starfleet Captain can get away with. Not my story, but it doesn't deserve to die on an obscure locked forum. M/W/F updates
1. Chapter 1

This is slightly-impure Star Wars so far, set basically between Yavin and Hoth, with some continuity deviations, mainly to do with starfighter availability and just how much an Imperial Starfleet Captain can get away with. I found it lurking in a backup folder and decided to update it with some of the things I've found out from SDN- here beginneth Chapter 1.

Ghorn system, Vineland sector, a minor offshoot of the Perlemian run.

As fitted a system so close to one of the major arteries of galactic trade, there was a fleet presence.

Around a dim, red-orange star near the end of its life, planets; two gas giants, with their horde of moons and asteroids clustering and flustering around them, three smaller worlds huddling close to their dying sun. It had been burning itself down for longer than there had been star-traveling life, and the living creatures on the little lumps of rock were in no danger just yet. Except from each other.

A large slice of that danger, made actuality in durasteel, hung in latticework repair bays over the small blue-green haven of Ghorn II. It hovered protected by the guns of the planet's north polar defence station, a fleet tender standing by the much- scarred ship, shuttles and tugs and work platforms roaming over it.

Imperator I-refit-II Star Destroyer Black Prince did not look much like the pride of anyone's navy, least of all that of her crew.

A grotesque patchwork of faded parchment yellow, gleaming white replacement hull, bare silvery metal, a few slabs and patches that were the colour of her name, angry heat- red emergency field repair and dots of fused blue- black scoring all across the much abused hull.  
She would never feature on any recruitment poster, was lucky not to have been condemned as beyond economic repair, but she was one of the Twenty-Five Thousand, and far from the least, except in numerical precedence.

Beneath the registry number, 721, were a line of non- random black dots- silhouettes of ships. They were the boast, and the gun crews' skill the living proof, that for all the damage abundantly visible she had given out far more than she had taken.

The tender Sahallare's job was field repair; in theory this was nothing out of the ordinary. In practice, most of them were spending as much time boggling at the ship as working on her. How was she still in one piece?

'What in stang happened to her?' One of them said to his workmate.

'Lots of things, lots of times.' The second technician said. 'You ever seen anything this badly beat up and still flying?'

'Yeah, a YT- series, but that was on a wanted poster.' He was looking up at the kill markings beneath the starboard- side row of heavy turbolaser turrets, in particular the bulged oval that represented the Mon Calamari cruiser Irrepressible. The Rebellion had not forgiven nor forgotten.

A pressure shelter had been hung over the section of dorsal hull they were working on- deep-annealing a fusing line between two replacement hull plates.  
They could work faster, and with a lower accident rate, that way than by wielding the clumsy jackhammer- looking heat projectors in spacesuits.

It also meant they could be kept under observation more effectively, and the work shed erected on the outer skin of the destroyer had a stormtrooper detail watching them.

The first workman was getting increasingly jumpy, glancing at the stormtroopers, glancing up at the kill score. There was a lot of blood on this ship's hands, and some friends of friends of his would be interested to know that she was here.

Concentrate, he told himself, just do the job, don't draw attention to yourself, keep your head down.

Finish the shift, get out, and then he could go to the com center on the Sahallare, use his allowed call home, to which he would add certain phrases and emphases, which would be passed on to a man codenamed Starshine, and from there find their way to Third Mid-Rim Theatre Command.

Taking an Imperial Starfleet tender would be a shining achievement and a real practical gain for the Alliance; probably not going to happen, but they would settle for a chance at a beached Star Destroyer.

The rebel spy kept working, quietly, trying to avoid drawing attention to himself, hoping not to feel stormtrooper eyes on his back.

The destroyer's own crew were working on their ship from the inside out, dealing with the softer tissue inside the heavy armoured shell. Most of the problem was with control systems.  
The actual damage had not been at all severe, this time- not by this ship's standards- mainly ionization. Half the consoles in the main bridge pit were still dark, clusters of operators round others.

One of the turbolifts opened, and a very junior officer bounced in followed by two engineering ratings carrying a large box.

'I've got it!' the probationer lieutenant said. 'El Fuzz says that it's the-' He had expected his classmate to be the only one there of importance; he had failed to notice the tall, thin vulturelike figure of the executive officer at the back of the bridge. He realized he was in trouble when everyone else turned to look at the exec.

'Carry on.' The exec told everyone else, pointed at the lieutenant, pointed at the deck in front of himself. The probationer gulped, slunk over.

'Who sent you up to the bridge?' the exec asked, coldly.

'Uhm, er,' the probie tried to wriggle out of it, 'I was told you were on board the tender, Sir, I really wouldn't-'  
'Is this really a line of defence you want to pursue?' the exec loomed. 'That you would not have expressed extreme disrespect of a senior officer, if you had realised that you might get caught?'

The poor, raw lieutenant was visibly squirming. 'Sir, I meant no-'

'The proper response under the circumstances,'; the exec advised him, 'is- repeat after me- "I am guilty of gross insubordination, I apologise, I will accept the mandated punishment, and I won't do it again." Say it. And do try not to make it worse for yourself.'

The lieutenant looked left and right; apart from the rest of the repair party, the only other people on the bridge were a four- being stormtrooper detail. One of them was wobbling slightly, trying and failing not to laugh.

The poor probationer gabbled through the words, and then broke orders again by asking 'But Sir, how did you know I meant-'

'Who else would be sending you here, to say that it's the-? Context, probationer, context. What does the chief say the trouble is?' The exec would come back to attempting to entrap a senior officer later.

'The secondary nav system, Sir. When it was ionized it went into full reset, and the only uncorrupt backup was the initial dockyard settings. It, ah, isn't accepting that the ship's been modified, and is trying to override the primary nav system, which it thinks is obviously still damaged.' He parroted.

'A hardware patch?' Not normal procedure.

'Um, I think so, Sir.'

'Do you actually understand any of what you've just told me?'

'I, I think so, Sir.'

'Hmmm. Let us review the charges.' The exec began pacing up and down in front of the main viewports. 'Disrespect of a senior officer. Compounding the offence by asking me to refer to said officer in the same terms. Disobeying an order- not to make it worse for yourself, which you did. That is a technicality, however- where are you from?'

'Pomolthooine, Sir.'

' '-tooine' means 'Barren wasteland' in some language or other, I swear. Your only authority there would have been your family, which you disobeyed in any case to go to the academy.' The exec did not know this, and was making it up as he went- accurately, it seemed, from the probationer's reactions.

'Poorly brought up, crammed through an abbreviated training program. Insufficiently prepared.' The exec paused for thought, pacing up and down.  
'The daily bread of a starship is training and exercise. For all elements. Practise prepares us for the reality of working the Emperor's will on the reluctant to obey.'  
That much at least was doctrine; what came after less so. 'Our onboard stormtrooper group has a deep probe interrogation team attached. They, too, need training and practice.'

The exec dropped his voice to a whisper. 'If I had any reason to think that you weren't simply a loose- tongued fool, I'd hand you over to them to use as a torture dummy.'

'Sir, please don't sir it was just a slip of the tongue, I genuinely meant no disconscious resp, I mean no conscious disrespect-'

'My duty,' the exec stated, 'is to make competent starmen out of people like you. At the moment, you're alive because I'm assuming you're an idiot. That is not a long term survival strategy.  
A punishment that fits the crime- I think I'll make you use your brain. I want a full rundown on the ship's hyperdrive systems. How and why they work, evolution of hyperdrive, navigation systems, how they integrate with ship sensors and electronics, new experiments in hyperwave theory- I want you to prove, not to me, to the Chief Engineer, that you're worth more to the Empire alive. Report back to engineering- Dismiss.'

The poor probationer, almost in shock, stumbled off the bridge.

The exec walked over to the port sub-gallery, the ship's com centre, out of earshot of all but the sensors in the stormtrooper helmets; and released his own repressed burst of laughter. El Fuzz, indeed. He shook his head, went to the intraship terminal. 'Engineering? Get me Commander Mirannon.'

A few moments later, an extremely hairy man in dirty overalls came to the other end of the terminal. When he had time to perform personal grooming, at best in other words, Engineer-Commander Mirannon looked like a wookie disguised as a human. When he had other priorities, like now, he looked more like a human disguised as a wookie.

'Ah, Commander Dordd. What is it?'

'Do I look like a waste disposal unit to you?' the exec said.

'I rebuild ships, not men- talk to Medical.' The bulky, grease and dust stained engineer said.

'You seem to think I am; you keep trying to dispose of unwanted junior officers by feeding them to me.'

'Oh, you mean the work crew.' Mirannon's expression was not easy to read behind the beard.

'Why are you using a hardware patch for a software solution?'

'It's temporary, it deadends the interference from the secondary nav computer. I have all the processing power I can get my hands on running finite element analysis for the ion drive calibration, hyperdrive's a straightforward derivation of the same analysis. Eight more hours to work the balance out and twelve to set it up.'

'So the engines are sound, then?' Dordd asked.

'It's the firing controls that aren't. We can make full acceleration, if you don't mind a line of thrust, and relative inertial field, around eighty milliradians off the centerline of the ship. Probably not in the same direction, either.' He sounded as if he didn't expect Dordd to know the difference between a milliradian and a microchloridian.

'Primary nav is functional, it's sublight drive that isn't.' Dordd stated what he thought the position was. He was about to go on when the bridge PA called him.

'Commander Dordd, report to the Captain's day cabin. Repeat-' and he was moving already.

The day cabin was basically a cubbyhole just off the bridge for a cot and a desk, where the ship's commander could get datawork done, catch a catnap, and still be within thirty seconds of the bridge.  
Very few Star Destroyer's captains let it remain that basic. It was a common joke that, as the ship's offices were in the command tower, if the rebels did blow it off you might be better not restoring emergency control, just go down with the ship.  
Otherwise, you would only spend the rest of your life paperchasing through the navy bureaucracy trying to rebuild the lost records, medical files, requisition and stores reports, status sheets, personnel records- it was the bane of the navy's life, and more than one captain wished he could do his filing by turbolaser.

On the other hand, it meant there was lots of room to expand more important facilities into- just squeeze the offices up a little tighter. Preferably with the staff still in them.

Many Imperial warships spent more time fighting the bureaucracy than they did the enemy. Between a tremendous stroke of luck at the beginning to build on, and a combination of interest, brown-nosing, judgement and blackmail, ISD-721 had won victories roughly comparable to a certain infamous proton torpedo entering a certain poorly shielded exhaust port.

The Black Prince's commander's day cabin had expanded into a full scale penthouse suite including small swimming pool under a previous captain, but it was under new management now.  
The entryway had been converted back into something resembling the original purpose- desk, computer terminal, flanking datawalls and holodisplays.

An abstract, multi- belabelled image of the ship was being spun from one holoprojector; ship status display. It hiccupped occasionally, as if refusing to believe the image it was showing.

The captain had one foot up on the desk, and was frowning at the image. He was a man of above middle height- not the stick-figure of his XO, not far off either- and leanly built, dark hair turning grey at the temples, chiseled face, dark, dark eyes.  
Appallingly badly dressed- looking more like a sea- surface fisherman than a captain of a major warship, uniform tunic (faded) flapping open over a jersey of some palaeolithic material and grey- green uncertain colour.

'You sent for me, Sir?' Dordd asked. The captain nodded, waved him to the other chair.

'Yes…where would you be now, do you think, if no-one had shown you mercy as a loose- tongued probationer?' the Captain asked, tone well at odds with the words, speculative rather than punitive.

'About the same place I'd be if no-one had pointed out to me in time that there are limits to mercy.' Dordd said, still standing, not even bothering to wonder about how the captain had managed to overhear.

The captain nodded. 'Narrow line, is it not? Encouraging them in some directions, stopping them in others, shaping young mynocklets like that into the officers the fleet needs- especially when they arrive thinking they know it all.  
It was easy for us; the short sharp shock is less painful in the long run…someone thinks you're doing something right.' Captain Lennart handed his soon to be ex- executive officer a hardcopy of a recently received file.

Dordd read the first couple of lines, then his mind went blank. The Captain swung his foot off the desk, stood up, grabbed Dordd by the hand and shook it. 'Congratulations.'

The exec was still boggling. 'Thank you, Captain, I had thought-'

'Sit down.' Dordd collapsed into the chair. 'I did recommend you; it's not been an easy cruise, she can be a demanding old bitch, and you did well enough.'

The Captain's steward arrived then, as well timed as usual, with an iridescent metal tray, a crystal decanter and two glasses on it. Lennart poured the cobalt- blue liquid out himself, two full shots, and the two officers gulped them down.

'What's in that?' Dordd asked, reeling. It felt like a river of molten ice being poured through his head.

'Alien biochemistry's a wondrous thing- not a clue.' Lennart said, deadpan, and lying. Dordd's eyes went wide before he realised it was a wind-up. Lennart went on;

'I read it, of course,' meaning the hardcopy, 'Dynamic's one of the Arrogant- class. Not a new ship, which might be just as well.' Both of them knew exactly what he meant. The sort of people who were getting priority over new construction, neither of them felt comfortable around.  
'Weird little ships, seventy- five percent our- well, a standard Imperator's, anyway- length, thirty- six percent the volume and forty- five percent the mass. Supposed to be derived from the old Venator class- the pure combat version without the fighter bays. Half way through they realized they were doing it backwards, KDY turned the design study into a separate project and Rendili built the Victory class round the old reactor plant.  
Dynamic's a fast fleet hunter-outrider- once again, congratulations, Captain-designate Dordd.'

Delvran Dordd, very recently promoted Captain in His Imperial (and sith) Majesty's Navy, started to think about his new job. What was the size- for that matter, who were- the crew of the Dynamic? Where was she?

'Normally,' Captain Jorian Lennart told him, 'I'd do a fast flyby of her last reported position and drop you off, but supposedly she's been on boundary patrol on the outer Rim edge for the last year, and you'll remember how trigger happy we got on that detail. Especially right now with our drives in this state, best thing to do is for you to take a shuttle- no, better an assault transport. One's prepping now. You'll probably miss that.'

'Fighter support?'

'Everything it implies. A million worlds in the galaxy. Capital 'W' worlds, anyway.  
Another fifty million colonies. Four hundred billion stars- and tomorrow Black Prince could be on her way to any one of them. Engineering permitting.  
Even moving from exec to captain, you don't realize what that means until it hits you- like one of them, a small planet in the face. You don't have to be ready for anything, you have to be ready for everything.  
Arrogants don't have the multirole capacity to be sent any-and-everywhere, so it should be easier for you. You'll just be chasing ghosts all along the outer rim.'

'Does it say anything about fleet, oversector group, assigned op-area? Or crew?' Dordd asked, mind still reeling.

'Eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty- four, leaner manned than an Imperator.' Jorian poured another set of drinks, drank one of them. He was talking about the crew.

'So many, and probably the same unlikely blend of heroes and halfwits, starry-eyed idealists and black hearted thugs, overgrown children and dead- spirited cynics, blunderers, chancers, wasters, risk- takers, egomanicacs and lost souls, fools and rogues, murderers and paladins, and Bodgit and Scarper doing business as usual, changing face of the galaxy be damned.'

Dordd was worried. The captain was getting unusually maudlin; this wasn't like him. Most of the time, anyway. 'Are you sure this is safe for human consumption?' he said looking at the shot glass.

'I'm pretty sure it isn't. Maybe I am getting sentimental about my crew; but- what's devotion to duty, if not a sentiment? What's loyalty, if not a sentiment? Numbers are one thing, but you look out of the window down past the turrets and tell me we fought for the empire, and achieved that for the empire, on the basis of nothing more than reactor rated output.'

'Captain, I believe, but I don't understand. I'm not sure what I can do with what you're trying to tell me.'

'Well, on one level, you don't have a choice- no stormtrooper detail. I'm telling you that in addition to the worlds outside the ship, you've got another twelve thousand on the inside to worry about, one- or more- inside each crewman's head.  
They might actually be the most important. The universe is too big to cope with on your own.' Jorian Lennart shook his head. 'I must be far gone- more narcotic than drink in this.' Which was his excuse, anyway.

'Still, better a blinding glimpse of the obvious than a blinding flash of turbolaser fire. You need your crew.' He had one foot back up on the desk.

'You need them to work for you, you need them to think for you, you need them to believe for you. The best built fighting ship in the universe is pointless if the people running it are half trained and scared out of their wits. The worst- and the tender crew seem to think we come pretty close- is invaluable if it's properly used, and those twelve, or thirty- seven, thousand are as much the weapon as the ship is. You're probably going to make a better captain than you did an executive officer.'

'What do you mean by that?' Dordd asked, slightly stung.

'As exec, you have an answer for your problems. You have your part of the picture to look after and keep in order, you know what you ought to be doing. As Captain, you finally get to see all of the picture; and you realize that it's a puzzle. I am generally prepared to put up with far more, from this crew, than you are. Did you never wonder why?'

'It's deliberate, that much I got, but I never understood why you think it's a good idea.'

'If I was being appropriately cynical, I would call it the illusion of freedom. I need their belief, their pride and commitment in the ship and in the cause. As a captain, you depend on your crew- only fractionally less than they depend on you.  
One thing; your last official duty as executive officer of the Black Prince. Who do you recommend I promote to replace you?'

For a brief moment, Dordd was tempted to recommend Mirannon, if only for a taste of his own medicine. 'Lieutenant-commander Mirhak-ghulej.' The Chief Divisional Officer, midships starboard section.

'Interesting. Your logic?'

'He's done well in a difficult situation, keeping the most diverse part of the ship in good order, displaying what I think are the necessary qualities for the job.' Dordd answered.

'The crew loathe him. A man doesn't get ves daubed over the inside of all his uniforms for nothing. At first glance, I would have opted for Brenn. However, exactly because he would have been my personal choice, that could mean he's wrong for the job. Recommendation accepted.'

Dordd was still standing there trying to work that one out when the captain's steward came in again with a datapad and two antidote pills. Lennart read it, thought about it, handed it to Dordd.

'On the other hand, you may not want to miss this. It's from your favourite stormtrooper.'

'I don't have a-' Dordd started to protest, then got involved in what the message said. It was a report from one of the security troopers, concerning one of the tender's work teams. 'She doesn't even have a name.'

'Her being named Omega-17-Blue-Aleph-3 might make whispering sweet nothings a bit more difficult, true - question is, is her judgement trustworthy?'

Omega company was special attachments to legion HQ; things like seismic demolition teams, deep probe units, propaganda and destabilization, ugly, dirty, messy jobs. 17 was the team number, blue the specialization - Scout, officially, but clearly not exactly so - Aleph 3 was a personal number.

'Dockworker with high stress levels, trying not to draw attention to himself and getting it wrong, looking up repeatedly at the splotch for that damn' rebel cruiser - that doesn't make a spy.'

'I'm inclined to take it seriously.' Jorian turned to one of the subconsoles on his desk. 'Engineering? Mirannon.'

The huge man covered in red-brown hair and grey- blue grease came to the terminal, grumbling. 'Flarding interruptions, can't I get - oh, it's you, skipper.'

'How many decimal places are you running this analysis to?' Jorian asked him.

'As many as I can. Tender's got the tools and parts for me to fix a couple of long standing gripes, and synergy effects are going to take an unpredictable time to sort out - so many ifs and buts in the estimate, it'd make no sense. Sir.'

The Chief Engineer had a ship model on his seldom-used desk, which looked something like a cross between a normal star destroyer and a swan - wide, sweeping curves, streamlined, graceful.  
The rest of the engineering crew said that was what he was trying to turn the Black Prince into, one major refit at a time. And he knew perfectly well how long it was going to take.

'If you were Rebel Theatre Command, and you found out about an unescorted imperial fleet tender patching up a disabled star destroyer, what would you do?'

'Kriff.' Mirannon swore.

'Don't think of it as losing time in calibration; think of it as saving time spent in damage control. How soon can you give me manoeuvring thrust?'

'We can thrust, with a moderate to high chance of becoming pate in the process, and we definitely can't steer. It's not the only problem - I'm doing that the long way because there are other jobs needing done in the mean time. Power distribution forward of the hangar bay is shot, we're using DC' - in this case, Damage Control - 'portaconduits that won't take long duration at full power. They need a proper rebuild. Overlapping shields burning each other out. It's all do-able, but it'll take time. Can't we just call for support?'

It was possible that by arresting the rebel agent, they could avoid contact entirely. Lennart hadn't even seriously considered it. It wasn't their job to avoid combat, and he was still in fighting temper after the clash that had landed his ship in a repair bay.

Capability was the only question. 'We'll notify fleet. How much notice they'll take I don't know, we're strangers here. We're not far off being able to do the job ourselves. I know perfectly well, chief, we're not going to be a hundred percent in less than twenty days. I'm thinking ambush. How soon?'

'I can knock a couple of hundred decimal places off the calibration and patchwork it- six hours, and the compensators will be redlining. Don't push it. Another twelve past that to be able to hyper, well below full speed though- stable at point two five, best rough estimate. If I can borrow half the legion to do the donkey work with my people directing, shields in eight hours.' Mirannon groaned inwardly, but stated the facts.

He was not an unhappy man in his job, usually. Imperial Starfleet engineers fell into one of two categories; peacetime, or at least civilian university, trained with general and comprehensive background knowledge- in other words, overqualified; or military academy trained and thus barely qualified- too narrow, too specific, skipping too much of the groundwork and basics to get to the workaday details.

Gethrim Mirannon fell very firmly into the former category, and it would have been difficult to prevent him reassembling the ship to suit himself, if in fact Lennart had wanted to stop him. For all that they snarled at each other occasionally, they were in effect partners in crime.

'No support from the tender?'

'The equipment I can use. The people-no. They're why we've got the interaction problem.'

'OK, chief, that sounds good enough. Get on with it.' He dropped the link to engineering, and typed in an access code. 'OB173, this is Black Prince Actual.'

'You're not supposed to be on this network.' A female voice came back out of the speakers- deep, contralto, amused rather than offended.

'Tell me more about this rebel of yours,' Captain Lennart asked.

'Probability that he has something to hide; unity. Probability that it is Rebellion related; 0.92. Do you want me to take him in?' she asked, phrasing it purely as a question.

Lennart looked at Dordd. Dordd wanted to. Lennart decided against it.

'Negative, OB173, he hasn't had time to get the word out. Take him now and we'll have nothing to trap. Your team has the ball on this one. Monitor him, let him communicate, then grab him and brainburn him.'

'Yes, Sir.' She said, clearly looking forward to it.

Captain Lennart backed out of the stormtrooper comnet, turned to Dordd. 'Don't know what you see in her. Personally I'd be more inclined to run away screaming...do you want to leave for the Dynamic, or do you want your old job back- in an acting capacity- to see this one through?'

Dordd stood there, thinking. Technically he shouldn't even have been given the choice, but he had. On one hand, his own ship; on the other hand, combat against the rebellion- and he would just as soon put off the chaos of taking command for another day or so, to get his head straightened out.

'You might need the assault transport.'

Lennart smiled. 'Good.'

There was a lot that was not as it had been originally specified about the Black Prince. As part of an experimental program, she had her main hangar bay compressed. A quarter of the pads expanded out to full maintenance bays, and the rest reduced to virtual wingtip to wingtip storage. Ceilings lowered, floors added, waste space eliminated.

The Oversector Fleet command she had been operating with at the time had been obsessed- more like traumatized- by rebel starfighters, and Black Prince had been in for major refit after taking a kamikaze rebel gunship-corvette in the flight bay. A bay that had been suspiciously empty of personnel at the time.

Strings had been pulled and reputations traded on, and the end result was that the veteran destroyer had the support for a double normal strength fighter wing.

There was actually an Imperator- conversion that did this anyway, and it had proved easier, administratively, to get one of their heavy fighter wings assigned, but that variant lost too much capability as a warship for Lennart's taste, and this way he had the best of both worlds.

The pilots were not busy at the moment. This was officially safe space, and the space they had come from had been decidedly unsafe.  
They had taken losses, and needed time to draw breath, reorganize, and have the ground crews assemble replacement fighters from parts storage.

Most of Epsilon squadron had passed through the mourning stage, and got just about as far as 'Thank the force it wasn't me.'

Their unit bay held, on the lower level, their actual fighters, launch racks, maintenance pads, stores and spares, on the upper level- separated by a comfortingly thick armoured deck- the squadron ops room, office, ready room, rec- usually pronounced 'wreck'- room, mess- which it was, ground crew barracks, pilots' cabins.

The squadron leader's cabin had black bunting around the door; half of it had been torn off and was now draped over the shoulders of Epsilon-3, he had a drink in one hand and with the other he was playing a kazoo. After their fashion, it was a wake.

In the squadron office, the only pilot not participating was sitting behind the desk, one hand holding a soother-pad over her forehead, stylus in the other, looking at three datapads and wishing her head would stop throbbing, or Three would stop playing that thing.

She had lost her own element leader, and been lucky not to have her own head ripped off when a lump of engine from a detonating rebel fighter had caved her cockpit viewscreen in. The senior flight commander of Epsilon squadron was therefore in a black mood, and wondering if anyone had ever in fact been beaten to death with a kazoo. Surely it had been tried.

She knew that if she did stand up and go to get some quiet out of them, she would probably end up doing some of the rebellion's work for it.

'Flight lieutenant Rahandravell?' the door opened, and a misshapen figure said.

'If you don't shut that door, I'll start blasting on the count of three.'

The lopsided man came in and closed and sealed the door; he had the same rank insignia she did, although rather less of a body to pin it on. The squadron adjutant was a grounded pilot; he had been on an atmospheric strafing run when a minor hit had caused his laser power cells to split.

That had cooked the blaster gas off, which had burnt off too many nerve endings for regeneration therapy to do much good.

'How do you do this, Yrd? How do you stop yourself accidentally telling the truth to the poor silly bastards?' Rahandravell poked at the datapads with the stylus. They were three letters to next of kin.

'Lady Lyria Tellick; dear lady, your son died when a rebel heavy fighter blew the front of his cockpit off. I saw him drifting there in space with no legs, and I don't know whether loss of blood or loss of air managed to kill him first, because I could still hear him screaming and thrashing round, so I know that shock didn't.

Malomik Inturii, rust farmer; dear sir, your brother gave his life for the empire. Actually, he threw it away because he couldn't stand it any longer, he ejected and was caught on the tail of his fighter, I should have given him a clean death there and then myself but I didn't, the impact broke every bone in his body below the ribcage, they tractored him in before he could decompress but he killed himself in the med bay because he couldn't take the pain any more. How do I not say that? How do I make them think it didn't happen?' she was crying.

Yrd was afraid to comfort her; he didn't know her all that well. She was a highly competent pilot and an excellent shot, but had a reputation as an ice maiden; she kept whatever drove her sealed up deep inside. Now that was cracking wide open, and it made him squirm.

He didn't know how to cope with it either. He started by rambling.

'When I got shot up, I could have invalided out. Maybe should have, but home, for me, is Kuat. What would be the point? Every time I looked up, I'd see a sky full of star destroyers. I wouldn't be leaving anything behind.

That and I couldn't stand the thought of being back among the normals. They wouldn't understand if-' the first thought that came into the adjutant's head was 'if you beat them to death with the squadron leader's blown off legs.' He knew better than to say things like that. Shock wasn't going to work.

He was saved by the link terminal. It was no less a personage than the Captain.

Lennart had not simply been venting steam when he talked about believing in his crew; it was impossible to know thirty- seven thousand individuals, but he could keep track of section leaders, the senior enlisted rates- and the handful who screwed up badly enough to merit his attention- and at least the top layer of the ship's fighter and ground combat attachments.

'Flight lieutenants.' Lennart began. His attention had been drawn by an incomplete item of paperwork- notifications to next of kin still to be sent off. He took one look at the state of the two officers on the other end of the terminal and decided there might be a problem.

'The ship we were sent to rescue survived.' He cut straight to the chase. Given the strike cruiser's ineptitude in managing to need to be rescued, it was probably only postponing the inevitable.  
'The Rebel ambush failed. This ship survived. That doesn't make it any easier to bear when it's your friends and colleagues that didn't. Talk to me.'

She stumbled through it again.

'Your private griefs are your own, and no-one can, or should, help you with that.' He knew perfectly well that she had been sharing a bed with the squadron leader.  
'When we come up against competent, determined opposition, some of our people will get killed. That much is certain, and I have two hundred and fourteen of those to send myself. My consolation is that I have twenty- two hundred not to.' The crew of the strike cruiser.

'Necessity determines whether we take the risk or not, chance determines who pays the price- insofar as anybody can be responsible for such a self- willed, contrary creature as a fighter pilot, I was responsible for him, and for you. I asked him, and you, to take that risk, and he did not die to no cause nor, considering the mauling we gave that rebel bastard, unavenged. What's important now is to do our best to avoid having to write any more. As Franjia Rahandravell, you mourn- as Epsilon Five, your squadron mates and the ship need you. It is that simple.'

She sniffled a little more, wiped her eyes dry- still bloodshot red, though.

'Two other things. Tellick's mother- I met her. I reckon she has a certain secret sympathy for the Rebellion. Tell it as you please- I don't think she deserves the truth- but make sure she knows who killed her son.' Franjia nodded.

'Other thing- do you need stormtrooper support to deal with that kazoo?' Lennart asked, deliberately changing tone.

'Captain.' She said, reproachfully- he was trying to lift her mood, she didn't immediately realize that.

'It's been so long since they got to do anything, they're getting stir crazy. I have manhunter teams pulling rank to demand jobs even as mindnumbing as walking security; if I sent a detachment down there to keep order, I'd have difficulty stopping them trying to use an AT-AT.' He paused for a couple of seconds. 'Seriously- you're going to be all right.'

'Yes, Sir. What was it you wanted?'

'Already taken care of, flight lieutenant. Carry on.' He broke the link.

If he had been stupid enough to accept Lyria's invitation, and if Ezirrn Tellick had thought he had a future, she could easily have been his daughter in law.  
She probably was good enough to move up a rank, he thought, but not now, not until her heart resumed normal operations, and not in her present squadron. Replace Tellick directly, and give her the next or next-but-one available squadron leader's billet.

Depending on what happened- time for their spy to contact the alliance, time for them to analyse the information and make a decision, time for them to get a capable unit here- that billet could be open in twenty to thirty hours.


	2. Chapter 2

The shuttle meandered its way through hyperspace, with most of the crew asleep.

The course was plotted and the nav computer was looking after it, so there was nothing to do but doze, amuse yourself in the privacy of your own quarters, or someone else's if you were lucky, or sit on the flight- deck and watch the streaks of stars go by.

The seven-man crew had done this times beyond count, and although they were carrying a relatively valuable cargo- heavy servos for the secondary turrets, blaster gas for everything that went 'zap', and a replacement squadron commander- just let the ship get on with it, even this near breakout.

The replacement was on the fight deck, along with the co-pilot, who had drawn the short straw. Both were looking out of the radically-sloped main viewscreen.

'Are you sure you should be doing that? It starts to play weird tricks with your head after a while.' The shuttle officer said, lazily. Best to make it sound as unofficial as possible; his passenger outranked him.

Privately, the passenger agreed. Somewhere past the screaming blue-white nodes racing at them, there was a capital ship waiting with a squadron of hyperspace capable fighters. He would probably be seeing far more than enough of this view, and without room to so much as turn over.

'I mean', said the shuttle pilot, struck by an idea of his own, 'are they really stars?'

'What are you on about?' Peremptory enough, and it would have been worse if half his attention wasn't on the future.

Lieutenant-Commander Aron Jandras, proceed to Ghorn system Vineland sector, take command of Epsilon squadron, composed of Starwing fighter-bombers, of Strike Wing (Provisional) 721 based on board ISD Black Prince, and for doing so this shall be your warrant, to fail at your own risk...although the last part was really superfluous.

'All the streaks. Could be anything- could be dust, meteors, interstellar gas, some kind of leakage from the hyperwave. If they are stars, we must be covering a lot of space. Could have gone half-way round the galaxy without really noticing. Wouldn't that be something, to have seen the universe without ever realising it.'

No real point in jumping on him, Aron thought. Don't have to make an impression; he's not directly under me. Although if this is a fair example, they must be a pretty loose outfit.

He had a point; the nav computer did it all. You told it to go from point A to point B, it came up with possibilities, and you picked one. It was the act of an expert to go through the advanced options like short- cuts and mapping to realspace.

'Then it happens to everybody. You can still know enough to get to where you're going.'  
True enough, but not really worth further comment.

The ten- minute warning sounded, and the rest of the crew appeared. Neat enough, and they went through the drill with no appearance of incompetence; manning the piloting and all the gunnery stations, standing by to make a sensor sweep and raise shields.

'How bad is this sector?'

'Huh?' the copilot answered.

'You're preparing to make a combat drop, into the middle of a subsector HQ and major naval base.'

'Pretty bad, but that's not it. Captain would roast us if we didn't.'

'Just how literally do you mean that?'

'Well, he has been known to use lazy or stupid crewmen as jury rigged heat exchangers.'

Although they probably would try to put the wind up him, there was every chance that it was literally true. Star Destroyer captains were judge, jury and executioner on board their own ship, and the megalomaniac count was very high indeed. Not much fun to be on the receiving end of, but the alternative was...impossible. No-one less than superhuman could keep track of and motivate thirty- seven thousand men by any other means. At least, so ran the doctrine.

The shuttle dropped out of hyperspace. Ghorn was a more than usually red- orange star, dim and well through it's life off in the distance on the port bow, and the planet in front of them was far more than usually built- up for this far out in the mid-rim.  
Orbital platforms and manufactory modules littered the nearby space, and there were three blobs hanging above one of the poles of the planet.

'There she is.' he said, once he had found the destroyer, and waved Aron over to the station. The co- pilot could still be heard going through identification and traffic control procedures in the background while he examined what the sensors were telling him.  
1A2-class Star Destroyer. Built early, rearmed with the new gun fit. Veteran. At first, he swept the narrow- arc optical finder right across it, not quite believing when the direction pointers told him otherwise.

As he zeroed in on it, clear from very slightly above it's beam, he realised that was because he hadn't instantly recognised it as an Imperial fighting ship.

He had half- expected it to be black. What parts of her original hull remained were faded yellow, mostly, and marred in many places by blaster scars; large parts had not remained.

The forward four hundred metres of the ship was brilliant, regulation reflective/conductive white- with an unpleasant series of irregular hummocks just behind the unpainted area that probably marked the ends of major structural members, as if the entire forward quarter of the length of the ship had been torn off and a new one mounted.

There was also a huge unpainted patch low on the starboard midside, with charred edges, where the kamikaze damage had been repaired but never cosmetically aligned.

A deep shredded carbon- marked segment above the starboard vertex marked an attempt to chew it off by turbolaser. There was a tangled heap of molten metal where one of the main scanner domes had been, and a new one mounted on the forward edge of the superstructure, as well as a direct replacement just inboard of the molten lump.

The main superstructure was less impressive than usual, shot up and rebuilt in SSD-black durelium rather than standard durasteel; it also looked off centre, as if the bridge module had been moved- closer inspection revealed that it was the port side of the ship, a mix of bare and some strange red metal, that had been extended outwards, leaving the destroyer lopsided.

There was also a jagged scar at the base of the bridge module, as if someone had tried to blow it off and only just not succeeded.

'Galactic Spirit...' battle damaged wasn't the term, he decided. At a rough estimate, if the ship had taken all of that damage at once- there were numerous blaster scars- she would have been blown apart three times over. Battle fucked was nearer the mark.

'Look under the superstructure.'

There were scars and craters there too. The ship's name and registry number-hull 721. And a series of black blobs that resolved themselves into silhouettes. He looked, and kept looking.

An Old Republic Procurator class battlecruiser. Two Hapan battle dragons. Three alien craft he did not recognise. Two Victory-class Star Destroyers. A Rebel MC-80 Starcruiser. An Imperator-class Star Destroyer with a phoenix mark. More than a dozen lighter capital combatants.

'How did that- that flying junkyard manage to take out a kriffing republic battlewagon?'

'Dumb overconfidence on their part, very smart shooting, and a lot of luck with the terrain.'

'A fair kill tally for a ship that looks as if it crawled out of a junkyard.' he said, impressed but refusing to show it. If they were all directly claimed, the Black Prince had seen a massive amount of combat, even for a ship her age.

'You've got no idea how much work it takes to keep her that way.' he said, enigmatically.

'Yes, Sir.' the pilot could be heard responding to someone on the com link, and he leaned forward to push all the throttles past their safety stops.

Turret 4-Port;

'I get this not.' Pellor Aldrem announced, from the gun pointer's console. He was a fair haired man dressed in a quasi- regulation armoured spacesuit that had been customised to take a gunner's helmet; if their turret did get hit, chances were they were toast, but flukes did happen and he wanted to be ready to take advantage of them.  
Technically, he was a Senior Chief Petty Officer; in practise, he was the best shot with a turbolaser on the ship, and held rank as a turret commander accordingly.

'I really wish I just didn't. That slimy jizzbucket Lomarel, he's left half a rationpak smeared over the power monitor. At least I hope it's a rationpak.' The next most senior member of the gun crew, 'Fussy' Fendon, grumbled.

'Yeah, well, he is the guy his own turretmates bought an inflatable nerf for.' Aldrem made an effort to be tolerant. Lomarel had been a member of his own gun crew before being punted up and out, and the chubby, smelly freak sort of grew on you. Then again, so did fungus.

'And a sound damper field. I don't care if he makes a dianoga's nest out of his own turret, if he does we might be rid of him and it would probably do a better job, but why's he allowed to make a mess out of our turret, hey?'

'That's what I don't get. We're in dock, right? Caution, maybe, keeping us busy, maybe, but it's the after turret in each battery that's kept manned. The one with the best all round field of fire.'

Two quad- barreled heavy turbolasers, thermal shroud around each tapering down, adding to the perspective and making them look like a clutch of lances to stab the stars with.  
Each of the quads elevated independently, traverse of about three or four degrees on it's own sub- platform, against a barbette and back- plate hardened to withstand planet- shaking shocks, anchored in suspension- film neutronium.

Wondrous stuff; it's hyperdense fluid nature made it the most perfect shock absorber in the universe, the only material substance that could take the recoil a heavy turbolaser battery kicked out.

Aldrem ran a hand over the pointing grip; with this, he could make countries disappear…it was fortunate for the planet underneath them that he was a stable individual. Whatever his file said.

It had happened, hadn't it? Star destroyer in the inner rim, permanent defence orbit around the sector capital. One of the gunners had fallen in love with a local, he had two-timed her, some said stood her up at the altar. She had waited, seemed over it, divisional officer hadn't caught it in time, she had simply climbed into the turret one day, pointed it down and made the cheat's home city into a green fireball.

Some of the newer ships had monitors installed to prevent someone in an unbalanced state of mind getting into the turret; apart from the fact that most people tended to be in an abnormal state of mind when shot at anyway, Black Prince had never received that particular upgrade.

Just as well, Aldrem thought, thinking about the team he was in charge of. Fendon's nitpicking precision had saved them from malfunction and flashback more than once, at the gun status monitor board, but he wasn't a man you could go and paint the town purple with.  
Wasn't he a member of some obscure mid rim cult? Still busy vehemently denying the existence of things everyone else had forgotten about.

Number three was Areath Suluur, a dark- haired, warm brown- skinned man of indeterminable age- always armed, always coldly, fluidly precise on the job, and his service record was a pack of lies.

Whatever he had really been and whatever he had done he, on the other hand, was a good mate off the job, even if he did occasionally look longingly at stormtrooper armour, and react strangely to a few things. He was comms and sensors op.

When things went well, that was all the turret needed to serve it's guns. Unsurprisingly, it often didn't run that smoothly.

The other twelve turret crew were there to deal with problems as they came up, and were supposed to be capable of any running repair up to and including replacing a shocked- loose barrel in it's recoil cradle. Also capable of replacing the alpha team if they were the ones that got hit.

'Yeugh. This- it's almost whole.' Fendon held something up for inspection.

'Look, that console's sealed and hardened to stand vacuum and light flashback. You won't break it if you hose it down.'

Just then, the sky started to move around them. There was a small ball indicator, a space globe that showed two highlighted sections- their target- finder's current slice of sky, and their potential arc of fire. The ship pitched upwards.

'Manoeuvre jets function, and we have objects in arc.' Suluur said, looking past Aldrem at the globe. 'Control?'

'You call them- Fendon, don't do anything yet, but stand by to spin her up.' Aldrem told the power-tech.

'Fire Direction Control, this is Papa Four.' Suluur com'd to them. 'We have a line of fire to the station and the tender, IFF is still green, weapons are secure.'

'Papa Four- FDC. Weapons safe, repeat, weapons safe.'

'Zarri, what's going on?' Aldrem asked his friend in fire direction.

'We're pitching round to cover them, don't ask me why. Probably just Mirannon blowing off plasma.'

'Probably just getting ready to cover the tender if we are jumped, you mean.' Aldrem stated grimly.

'You could be right, Pel. I'll let you know if we get any real news.'

'Feel free to give us fake news, it passes the time. Papa Four out.' Suluur said, breaking link.

'So we are expecting trouble.' He said to the rest of the team.

'Stang, yes. Rebels think we're weak enough to jump, they'll send something to have a go at us.'

'Not surprising.' Fendon stated. 'The ship looks ready to come apart.'

'The guns are in perfect working order.' Aldrem stated. He was right, too. In the ambush that had landed them in dock, both sides had been heavily ionized, and after the initial clash the rebel cruiser had been shifting power and rerouting data to keep one system in working order - her hyperdrive. Black Prince had been doing the same- to protect her main battery.

'Maybe, but we look more like something that belongs to the rebel alliance.' Fendon declared.

'You joined after that, didn't you? That operation was a lot more fun to look back on than it was to go through, believe me.' Aldrem reminisced.

'Go on.' Suluur said, grinning.

'New Eguria sector, about, what, eight years back now? The sector group commander, it was Admiral  
Demorak I think, went rogue, refused an order and defected to the Rebellion. Well, what of it already existed by then.

He was Republic navy from way back- real stuffed shirt. We pretended to join him. You're right, we do look like something out of the alliance fleet- we weren't as bad, then, but they still welcomed us with open arms. Poor suckers. Talk about a target rich environment.' Aldrem chuckled.

'I wonder how fast people die, or quit, in the rebellion. I wonder how far back their memories go.' Suluur pondered.

'You wonder if we could get away with it again, you mean.' Aldrem said. 'That's the main reason we can look like this; command knows we're loyal. We get the edgy, dangerous jobs, places the rebellion's won itself an advantage, situations another ship might not come back from, we get the job. We don't always bring all of this ship back.'

'You and Captain Lennart.' Fendon said.

'I've met him, which is more than I can say about the skippers of some of the ships I've been on.' Aldrem said, glossing over quite a lot of the details.

'So what happened to the rebels?' Fendon asked.

'They were still using a lot of old Clone Wars kit, we picked up two Recusant and a Victory kill, but so much of the superstructure got blown away, it was as easy to refit to Imperator- II as it was to fix up as was.'

'Most of the rebels are just a gang of pirates anyway, aren't they?' Fendon pointed out. 'Their big ships are rare- we see a lot more of them than we ought to. I mean, the initials of their proper name are A-R-R. What does that say about them?' He said contemptuously.

'Don't read too much into that. I mean, what would it make us, ninja?' Aldrem said.

Suluur laughed quietly and said nothing.

Lennart had requested the presence of the tender captain and the defence station commander. Both of them came, largely out of curiosity to see what sort of madhouse this mongrel ship was.

Their Lambda shuttles arrived at the same time as Jandras'. Because he was riding one of Black Prince's own, they gave him priority.

What he wanted to do was look around the pad, inspect the strange arrangements here. He had served with a Star Destroyer's fighter wing, and competently otherwise he wouldn't have been up for promotion, but not with an outfit like this.

He picked up his baggage, wandered out down the ramp, realized who his shuttle had been given priority over and decided to run away and hide before his career was irreparably damaged.

He should have known better; nothing on this ship was ever thrown away as irreparably damaged.

Two people came up to him; one male, mid height, solidly built and wearing a tool belt, the other female, neatly and precisely dressed- he didn't recognize either of the insignia, but he guessed he was enlisted, she was an officer.

Franjia had taken the captain's advice, and joined in the wake; she had a fair amount to drink, grief turned to anger, she had verbally savaged half the squadron, and the rest of her felt much better for it- her skull was still complaining.  
She didn't remember if she had hit anybody or not, but her head felt bad enough to have spent most of the night headbutting stormtroopers; what Aron took for a ramrod up the spine was in this case her trying not to fall over.

'Welcome aboard, sir.' She said, extending a hand. He took it. He was short and broad shouldered, round faced and dark haired, she was taller than he was, hair so fair it was nearly white, oval faced, pale green eyes, looked like an icicle in a uniform. Physically fit, endurance rather than strength.

'Epsilon squadron?' He asked.

'Yes, sir- I'm Flight Lieutenant Rahandravell, Epsilon Five, this is Squadron Technical Master Sargeant Oregal.'  
'Run that one by me again. Flight Lieutenant?'

'Sargeant Oregal, as this explanation is technical, you should deliver it.' Franjia smiled, as the squadron ground crew chief got to make the only form of attack he was officially allowed; unleashing a steaming mound of bullshit.

'As a carrier based strike wing operating off a non- carrier, we are technically Starfighter Force rather than navy.  
Most of our personnel are in fact navy crossbadged to starfighter force, some of them are actually army hat jumpers but if this ship were ever to be officially classified as a carrier the naval personnel of the wing would revert to their permanent ranks whereas the army personnel would have to resign their permanent and have ratified their temporary commissions in the starfighter force in order to be allowed to serve with the navy.  
The upshot of this is- congratulations, you've been demoted. Although nominally O-equal the administrative responsibilities consequent on the rank mean that a squadron leader acquires effective juniority under a naval lieutenant commander. Do you know where that falls in the starfighter force rank system, sir?'

He's starting to look like I feel, Franjia thought. She would have snapped and told the sergeant to shut up before he got to 'technically'. Either he has an unusually and exploitably high gibberish tolerance, he is very patient and forgiving- also exploitable- or his brain is so fried that all of this is rolling right off him.

Oregal continued. 'We're a wing, therefore we're commanded by a group captain, who has multiple wing commanders under him to command the tactical groups. A group captain is considered equal in rank to a colonel but junior to a naval captain, which is anomalous because naval captain and colonel are considered nominally equal, it comes from the fact that the army recognizes the equivalence of the senior lieutenant's rank and the starfighter force doesn't, which should put a group captain higher on the pay spine but you know how the navy are.  
A squadron leader- you- commands a squadron except when such squadron is composed of heavy or multicrew craft in which case he commands a flight, normally the job of a flight lieutenant, and the squadron is commanded by a wing commander. Do you understand all that, sir?' he said, totally deadpan.

Aron had been letting it roll over him, but his brain wasn't that far gone yet. 'I don't need to, I have junior officers to do that for me.' Franjia and Oregal shared a look. Perhaps he wasn't totally hopeless.  
'Tell me about something I care about. Over normal strength, over normal weight, right? So what have we got in the wing, group, whatever?'

'Two squadrons of TIE Avenger, except Alpha-squadron lead flight is an experimental group- commanded by an actual group captain, just this once.' Franjia told him, pointing across the bay.

'Triple wings, each wing splits again? Preproduction models, except GpCp Olleyri- Alpha One- liked them so much he refused to give them back. They're supposed to receive a D-codename, Devastator, Dominator, some such.'

'The Commander Air Group- don't you start-' that directed at Oregal- 'leads from the front? Good- but I don't recognize a lot of these things. They can't all be experimental.' Aron said.

'We do get a lot of flight testing work.' Oregal told him. 'Some of them are regional specialties we liked and picked up, the rest- I'm the senior crew chief, by the way. I don't fly them, I just fix them- are odds.'

'The rest?'

'Two Bomber and three Interceptor squadrons, one of the interceptor squadrons is Xt- light shield units. One other Starwing squadron- Delta, we're junior- Hunters, Gamma squadron, are a regional specialty, folding winged. Fighters- more or less. Mu and Nu squadrons are experimental, and the other side of the credchip. The D- birds are a winner; those- aren't.' Franjia told him.

'The Ravagers are escort fighters. See how all the wing hangs down below the body, and it looks like two eyeballs welded together? That's because they are. Everyone in the wing who can hold a hydrospanner has had a shot at trying to keep those flying, and we reckon it isn't worth the effort.' Oregal said. Franjia confirmed.

'Turret fighters. They do not work, and if our report has anything to do with it, they will not enter general service.'

'Those flying wing looking things?' Aron asked. They looked beautiful, sleek and chromic, almsot to god to be true in fact.

'Designed to fit a new, maybe rediscovered old, weapon; weapon works, spaceframe's junk.' Oregal confirmed.

'I know I'm here as a replacement.' Aron said, looking at Franjia's face freezing over again. She had thawed out a little talking shop, now she was back to icicle. 'What happened?'

'The people we lost,' she said slowly, 'make it feel much worse than the numbers say. Squadron Leader Ezirrn Tellick, Flight Officer Garm Inturii.'

'Flight Lieutenant, I transferred in from an Interceptor squadron. There were only two people in the unit whose name it was safe to let myself get to know, and one of them was me.' Aron said, brutally. It was usually safer than the alternative.

'Are you suggesting we should let ourselves get killed more often, just to stay in practise?' she was ready to savage him.

'Clearly, I've pushed one of your buttons.' Best way to cope with it, Jandras thought, just plough on regardless. 'Those numbers. What do they say about the other side?'

'Two rebel half squadrons, X escorting Y wings, we destroyed four X and a Y, the rest ran, four damaged enough to claim.'

'Not bad- we seem to have got off on the wrong foot, Flight Lieutenant.' He started to say.

'The rebel bombers ripple- fired their antiship torpedo loads at us to give themselves time to flee to hyperspeed. That's how we lost Squadron Leader Tellick. We miss him, and I mean to avenge him. I know all about the two graves business, and I don't greatly care. Come on, I'll introduce you to the squadron.' Franjia stated.

'One thing. Oregal.' Aron turned to the sergeant.

'Yes, sir?'

'How do you remember all of that bureaucro-crap?'

'I'm studying to put myself through law school, Sir. Know your enemy and all that.'

'Kitrich? Help.' The young probationary engineer appealed to his room-mate. Mirannon had most of his senior officers and artificers, and himself, working non- stop; and had let the rest know that whether or not they ever got to be senior depended a lot on how hard they drove themselves now.  
Junior officers he wasn't worrying about, considering them unlikely to pull their weight in the purely technical work underway.

'What is it?'

'Have you stopped laughing about me getting into trouble yet?'

'What's the problem?'

'I got told to write a report on the ship's hyperdrive- and I'm lost. I mean, this makes no sense.' He had three large datapad- textbooks sitting open on their shared desk.

'Right now, all I know is that I don't want to go near one ever, ever again.'

'A hyperdrive or the exec?'

'Both. I mean…this is crazy. It doesn't work. It can't work. It can't work. According to this, the light barrier is impossible to cross.' He pointed to one of the textbooks. 'This calls it a…hypersymmetric transposition? As if we somehow change places with something on the other side of the light barrier? Which this,' pointing at one of the other datapads, 'calls a dead theory, proven nonsense- but this, the actual handbook-' he banged his head off the desk.

'Hyperdrive motivator, what does that mean? It motivates hyperspace, like makes it do circuit training until it gets tired and agrees to let us in? Time and energy running backwards, causality normalisation fields- when there is no normal referential frame anyway, and we depend on abnormal causality to get there?' He wailed, from the forehead-on-desk position. 'I give up. It's a black box with a 'go' button on it.'

'If it didn't make your head hurt, it wouldn't be worth working out.' Kitrich said, heartlessly, then he recovered a slight shred of mercy. 'Are you really baffled?'

'Yes?'

'Look…start with something you understand. Work with that, and work outwards from it.'

'I thought I understood power converters. Converter controls electron standing wave that intercepts and is energised by electromagnetic activity, converts low energy radiation like heat to usable power by draining back energy from activated electrons- regenerative heating, the energy gets dumped back in the reactor. It's the ship's heat sink system.' He opened a workbook.  
'T-E series, and most of a hypermatter reaction's product interacts weakly or not at all, and the core runs off five stage T-N series, process to control a process to control a process to control…how does the other side do it? How does a bunch of failed politicians and art school dropouts run ships dangerous enough that we have to be here trying to stop them?'

'They treat their tech as black boxes with 'go' buttons on.'

The tender and station commanders were escorted to the ready room beneath the bridge. The ship's scarred appearance was only skin deep; there were work crews everywhere- including a group of stormtroopers levering something into place under the direction of a small team of engineering enlisted.

The tender commander understood more of what was going on, and he was grudgingly impressed- still intended to shout at the captain for removing the tender's people and keeping their tools.

All but one of Black Prince's command team were there and waiting; Lennart, Dordd, gunnery officer, sensors and systems officer, navigator- the missing man was Mirannon, who was far too busy.

The bulk of the ready room was taken up with the main display table and the ring of seats around it- an arrangement the Rebels had apparently copied for their own starships. At the moment it was showing a display of the surrounding space.

'Junior Captain, Port Commander.' Lennart greeted them, emphasizing the fact that he ranked them and commanded a combat unit. Otherwise, they might not have believed that he was an Imperial naval officer.

'Two things; one of more interest to my people than to our guests. With effect from 1200 Coruscant Time today, Commander Delvran Dordd is promoted to Captain and appointed to command Arrogant- class Star Destroyer Dynamic.'

They cheered him, grouped around him, slapped him on the back, congratulated him. It was never an executive officer's job to be popular, and indeed he was not, but he was professional.

'Thank you.' He told them all, even the two visitors who had congratulated him with icy politeness. 'I'm remaining in my old job in an acting capacity for the moment, because we have another problem I want to see through.'

If it's getting this rustbucket to look like a proper warship, Dynamic's going to be waiting a long time, the station commander thought. It was depressing- worse, it was demoralising having this thing broken down and hanging in space near his people. What had happened to the Navy's standards?

'Junior Captain- Fokatha, isn't it? I never knew life on board a tender could be so interesting. Rebel spies and everything.' Lennart hand- signalled to one of the stormtrooper escort, who called their chief witness for the persecution. Omega-17-Blue-Aleph 3 walked into the ready room.

Perhaps one in ten of the stormtroopers in the 721st Legion was either a more recent clone or an actual veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic. Somewhere around one in thirty was female.

OB173 was both, and she had been designed for perfection. Dordd tried not to stare, and gave up. It wasn't just the way she walked, the obviously powerfully athletic frame, yet lithe and fluidly elegant; she could have stepped onto any catwalk in the Core, stormtrooper armour and all, and brought the house down.

She had her helmet hooked on her belt, showing off a long flowing crown of red- gold hair, a hawk face and bright, sharp star- blue eyes. Every male eye in the room locked on to her- except the captain's. He was watching her hands and her weapons.

Dordd was entranced. She's magnificent, he was thinking, a divine being, a snow-clad angel of death.

'Dockside security became suspicious of this man.' She said- glorious, glorious voice- slotting a datachip into the display. It was a split image of the worker, his personnel record. 'He was abducted from your ship, Junior Captain, and questioned.'

'Impossible! My security-'

'Is porous. They suspected nothing, before, during or after. He confessed to being a rebel operative. I have the details of that also, if you require them to convince you.' She was definite, thoroughly in control of herself, unquestionable. Which was exactly the effect she wanted to have, of course.

'Did you do the interrogation?' the station commander asked. He sounded ready to volunteer for one himself.

'I'm qualified.' She stated, simply. 'Others are more so, and it would have been unjust to deprive them of the chance to put their talents to use. He broke thoroughly, we have confidence in our conclusions.'

'Those conclusions being that the Alliance knows we're here. Thank you, trooper, you can go.' Before my acting exec drowns in a puddle of his own drool, Lennart didn't add. She saluted and glided out. Most of them watched her go.

'Gentlemen; tactical planning time.' Captain Lennart had to flare the holoimage- a maximum intensity pulse of light- to get their attention. 'What, if anything, will the rebels try to do to us, and how do we defend and counterattack?'

'Do you have any more like her?' the tender captain, mind still not with them, asked.

'It, people; a Grand Army clone template, limited edition, liaison communications and public relations. The effect she had on you, she was supposed to have on early imperial journalists. Can you concentrate on something other than thinking about seducing one of my stormtroopers?'

'Usual worst case scenario, Captain?' Commandwe Wathavrah- "guns"- asked. He had a peculiar mottled look about face and hands, could have been near-human, in fact had been sprayed with cryogen from a damaged laser cannon early in his career.

'Yes, no point worrying about that. Most probable case?'

'What's the worst case?' the defence station commander asked.

'The rebels put two and two together, realise it's us, decide to wipe out a lot of scores and send a battle group with enough collective firepower to make even the Executor nervous.' The navigator, Commander Brenn, fielded the question. He would have been the captain's first choice to replace Dordd as exec.

'We know exactly what to do about it; we run. Most probable, now…that depends a lot on the competence of the rebels.'

'Hmph.' The gunnery officer expressed contempt for the rebels' intelligence. 'Even disabled, a destroyer still takes a lot of putting down, they'll have to send something hefty.'

'Have to risk it? I don't think so.' Brenn stated. 'The only time they've ever been able to capture a Star Destroyer is when the legion aren't aboard, ideally none of the crew either. Not a serious objective. Nicking the Sahallare, though, that would appeal. Neutralise the Golan, demolish us, capture the tender.  
Dreadnaught- class cruisers; the last I heard, the rebels were starting to automate them and use the crew space for assault troops.'

'One of those old junkers against a StarGun? Even the Rebellion isn't usually that stupid.' Dordd replied.

'Starfighter support. Everything they have with an ion cannon, disable the station and the tender, probably those fancy ion pulse warheads as well. Dreadnought jumps in, finishes the station, fighters land and rearm with heavy demolition warheads, bombs and rockets, finish off the crippled star destroyer while the dread boards and captures the tender.  
Three phase strike, true, but all they really risk is an old junker and a few thousand meatheads.' Brenn replied.

'What's the system defence force going to be doing? Standing by and cheering?' the gunnery officer queried. 'Ghorn II under us has a pair of V-150s, there's a Lancer and a detachment of IPV's, and the garrison TIE wings.'

'So the rebels put commando teams in, covert insertion by tramp freighter ahead of the main op, seize the V-150s and use them against us, the rebel heavy fighters slaughter the garrison TIEs, and Lancers are dead meat against anything bigger than a starfighter. System defence isn't going to be much more than a speed bump to a competent rebel group.'

'Well, thank you very much.' The defence platform commander objected.

'Your platform is the only system asset the rebels need fear.' Lennart took control of the discussion. 'Brenn, your plan has them using fighters, spec ops teams, an expendable old ship and troops. I'm not convinced they have that much disposable fighter strength- but the V-150 idea is a nasty one. Guns?'

'Same old rebel idea; harder they hit us, further they knock us off balance, more chance they have of getting back whatever they commit. Victory or Mon Cal, fighter first wave then a combat drop, with us between them and the planet, use us as an ion shield. They'll try to blow the tender if they can't capture it.'  
'Point. Delvran?'

'Insystem spies. The rebels probably do have someone on the planet, it's a fleet transfer point after all. They'll see the preparations we make. Otherwise- send down stormtroopers to secure the ion cannon, half our fighters are hyper capable- use them as a reaction force, have them jump out now, jump in on signal to counterstrike the rebels.'

'So far. I don't see the rebels risking a major force unit- there'll be one, but it'll be distant support, outsystem waiting to hyper in. Our fighters clear the rebel fighters, Sahallare moves to shelter behind the Golan, we fight a conventional engagement in high orbital space with ion support to cripple and take the rebel strike ship.' Lennart decided.

'Captain!' the platform commander protested. 'Your ship's in no fit state-'

'It looks that way.' Captain Lennart smiled. 'We have full firepower, fighter and ground ops, we're six hours away from shield function, ten from basic ion drive and fifteen from hyper. The rebels can't plan and organise faster than we can come back on line, not with enough to be a serious threat. A half planned scratch group could be here now, but-'

There was a loud beep. 'Captain, this is sensor watch. Hyperstate bow shocks, multiple small craft. Incoming rebel fighters.'


	3. Chapter 3

'Count?' Lennart asked the duty sensor chief.

'Thirty plus, low intensity- possibly X, likely smaller.'

'Flight bay, Olleyri.' He told the com terminal; it's droid brain routed his words accordingly.

'Groupie? Inbound. Two minute readiness all, scramble Beta, Gamma, Epsilon- they need shaken down- Nu on close and point defence, Theta. Threat's two to three squadrons, rebel area command probably.'

'Sir?' It was abrupt, but the group captain overcame his shock. 'Acknowledged, moving.'

'All hands,' Lennart told the com terminal- it gave him ship wide broadcast- 'general quarters, incoming fighters. Engineering- Mirannon, what can you give me?'

'Roll and pitch, no main thrust yet unless you want a lot of pizza.' The chief engineer was not at all surprised to be interrupted this time. He was busy trying to tell one of the zone relative inertial field generators what it's sector of the ship was shaped like, and stop it arguing with the tensor fields and shield systems that were already there.  
If he had left it to its own devices, it would have taken the unit too long, five hours as opposed to ninety minutes, to bed itself in- and the field overlap would have been lethal. Inertial compensation was one case where two rights very definitely made a wrong. He did not stop to talk.

'Full weapons, the bridge, main battery and hangar bay emitters are in good enough shape to take power, I can give you shields there. Skipper, we've got no ion wake. We're wide open around the engines.'

'Better than I expected on the shields- the engines, depends on their tactical objective. I'll have it watched.' He turned to his guests.  
'Station Commander, Junior Captain, do you want to return to your respective commands- Commander, you should, Captain, you're probably safer here.'

The command team were already moving, the gunnery officer to the fire direction station buried in the base of the superstructure, Dordd to primary damage control, Brenn and the sensor officer to the bridge.

Aron Jandras, still getting used to the idea of being a squadron leader, had said very little to the pilots of Epsilon squadron; he had just surveyed the wreckage left by the wake, made a formal acknowledgement of taking over, and gone to what was now his cabin. It had been stripped and cleaned to within an inch of its life. The cot and several panels in the walls were new. The previous occupant had been effectively erased.

His previous ship had been an Imperator-I; the original barrack rooms had been remodelled into four- person dorms, which considering they fought in flights of three had been either perfectly useless or, the common theory went, an ISB trick to prevent pilots conspiring when off duty. Before that, a Nebulon-B which barely had room for fighters, and still did have a barrack room. He hadn't dared to joke about hammocks, in case anybody took it as meant seriously.

On the other hand, this time he had been assigned to a ship that looked as if it could be taken apart with a feather duster. For all the relative comfort of the quarters, he didn't intend to get comfortable- he might have to leave in a hurry.

He was still in uniform rather than flight gear, and he was reading through his copy of Technical Order 2-30SW-1. The Technical Order was as close as a starfighter came to having a manual- not as good as flight experience, but a lot better than climbing into a cockpit cold.

This evening, he would formally meet his immediate superior, the bomb wing commander, and the commander air group; he had scheduled two hours in the ship's simulator bank before then as the best way to get to know his squadron in the only way that actually mattered, and was reading up, not in expectation of imminent combat, but because he didn't want to look a fool in the sims.

The manual claimed the Starwing had the same rate of roll as an Interceptor, and he was in the middle of saying 'Bull-' when the GQ alarm sounded. More proof that censorship has gone too far, he thought as he began to move.

One of the things he had noticed was that the Starwing was supposed to have a pressurised cockpit. He wasn't prepared to place much faith in that, either. Flight gear was kept in the ready room, the flight suit was supposed to go on over the uniform, another idea that didn't work as well as it was supposed to.

He dropped the datapad Technical Order, sprinted for the ready room, collided with one of the other pilots on the way and stuck an elbow into his kidneys, wriggled into the ready room.

He had been expecting a mad scramble, locker room fire drill, not enough room for twelve pilots to clamber into flight suits at the same time, fend for yourself and devil take the hindmost; instead, odd numbers went in and got suited up first, with enough room to do it neatly and efficiently, then even numbers- wingmen.

Nobody explained the drill; it must have been in standing orders- the previous squadron leader's. He was left looking like a fool and an odd man out, and was that a sneaky look on Epsilon Five's face? Probably.

Normal pad arrangement on an Imperator was the two hangars in the forward wall opening into the main bay space, craft on ceiling racks launching through the hangars. Black Prince's complete rerarrangement had a much shallower main bay, and the extra six squadrons were accommodated in the 'loft space' on sloped racks releasing down through the deckhead of the bay.  
The lead six had a small docking and maintenance hangar, but they launched on racks that moved out through apertures in the otherwise sealed off forward wall. Instantly Aron hated it.

The frames for the racks were powered- if something failed, which he expected it might, what was he supposed to do, sit there and wait for the ship to come apart around him?

Standing there looking at it, he suddenly couldn't wait to get out into space.

The pilots around him all had their helmets on, as he did, the hamster-look that had it shown up on a living being would have been sent for reconstructive surgery instantly. Every time he saw one, he wanted to put a beanie hat on it.

The racks had already lowered the big, heavy- finned, shovel nosed craft to pad level, ground crew supervising and doing the pre flight checks. Oregal- Aron didn't even bother trying to remember his rank- was standing by his.

'Shields and weapons are charged and inactive, Sir, warhead load is standard torpedoes.' No sign of help. Which made sense, because if Aron didn't know what he was doing now, it was too late. 'Activate in the bay, Group'll tell you where to go from there, sir.'

Aron nodded; three steps up to the cockpit, slide in- much easier than a TIE Eyeball which had space exactly where it wasn't wanted- link the flight suit into the cockpit instrumentation and life support.

The cockpit was exactly as the manual had described it- sensor and comms panel on the left, ship combat systems in front, flight technicals on the right. Most of that was done in helmet in a TIE, there was a second of double vision as the helmet and the cockpit decided which was to be the prime information source, and the cockpit won.

It couldn't tell him what to do, though. He waited as the racks swung out, waited in part for the inevitable 'clunk', and marvelled when it failed to come. The fighter fell free; the gravity in the bay was set to fractional 'g' down and out, enough time to power up and swim out under manoeuvring ion power.

He was a second behind the rest in starting engines, a whole three seconds in remembering he had combat shields, and he could feel the squadron knocked out of synch by him. By now the ship's sensors had pinned down the rebels' vector of approach, and flightcom began the battle-play.

'Pilots, this is Olleyri.' When he wasn't tasked to fly himself, the group captain outright usurped the role of chief air controller, reckoning it was still his job to look after his pilots.

'We have two to three squadrons of rebel fighters incoming, and- now additional traces of small craft possibly armed freighters. Local area squadrons, they'll be using mostly older fighters, competence unpredictable- don't take them lightly even if they are flying poodoo. They may be good enough to be a threat. Beta leads the intercept, Theta flank cover. Nu squadron disperse for ship close defence. Gamma and Epsilon are reaction element. Out.'

So far, so standard, Aron thought, five against three, the full fighter complement would simply get in each other's way- although they were being held at short standby in case a threat developed that they would be needed for.  
Beta's Avengers- the best thing about this entire tour seemed to be that he now had some very impressive friends- would hit the rebels fast and head on, with Theta covering them. Personally, he had time to think.

Epsilon had simply taken station on him, in the same pretty much Rebel standard finger four formation, not the Imperial three- fighter V. It was how Cygnus recommended the gunboat be used, and he noticed it was how the Avengers were deploying.

Also, the sensors had given them enough warning that they were fully deployed before the first rebel hit realspace. Eight short strings of emergence flashes- deploying by flights; two waves, first wave a flight of X- wings, flight of Z-95s, two flights of local fighters he didn't recognise- big-finned taper nosed cylinders.

The second wave, a flight of Shobquix Gauntlets, a flight of those local fighters with bulgy pods on the fins- missile racks?- a flight of CloakShapes, a flight of Y-wings.

'Not often the zoo comes to visit us.' Someone- Beta One- said on the group channel. 'Second line looks like their bomb element, reaction element pass under the fighters, all units watch out for friendly fire from the Golan.'

Too confident, Aron thought, he's overeager. Committing us too soon.

On the bridge Lennart was watching the sensor picture develop. His ship's departments could do their jobs without micromanagement; the most useful thing he could do was comprehend and anticipate. Jammers were up, the rebels would have to get close for a detailed status scan, but they were heading this way. His ship was the main target, not the station.  
What was their plan? They were faced by four squadrons of the empire's best- and one of it's worst- and weren't planning to break off? What were they expecting to happen- or what else?

'Flight Ops, Lennart. Beta and Theta to press to close quarters now. Send Gamma in, pull Epsilon back, launch Mu to join close defence.'

Olleyri knew better than to delay; he transmitted the order- then asked what it was about. 'Aye aye, Captain- what's the plan?'

'We're disabled, as far as they know. Our main defence is our fighters. Alliance best practise is for them to use the local area force to draw out and chew up the wing, and the light freighters on their way are their best weapon for that. This is a space superiority op, not an antiship strike- a furball suits us, because-' emergence flares.

'Oh kriff.' Olleyri said.

'Exactly.'

Aron had watched the strange looking Hunters soar past over his head; ball and back block, longer, thinner folding thermal wings- hadn't Incom originally offered the X-wing to the Empire and been turned down for its price tag? If Sienar had tried to reinvent it afterwards with TIE technology, that was probably what it would look like.  
Their sprint thrust was far higher than a Starwing's; Aron didn't know any of them well enough to ask them to leave some for the bombers.

Then plan A came apart in red fire. A handful of larger rebel- red blips in the sensor scope, telescoping themselves down to combat speed, the instruction to Gamma to make full speed and Epsilon to break off, and a hailstorm of quad and light turbo- laser fire pouring into Beta, Theta and Gamma squadrons' path.

Two YT- series, a Ghtroc light freighter, and a larger ship- Customs corvette.

Aron's target sensor went off, he shouted 'break break break' into the com, and firewalled the engines twisting the Starfury up and to the right in the start of a tallon roll.

A salvo of light turbolaser fire screamed past behind him; the manual was right about the beast's agility.

He was supposed to be keeping these people alive, not just himself; glance at the scope- a couple of fuzzy green blips, hit but taken on the shielding, before the rebs had changed target to the closer Hunters.

'Epsilons, form up again on me, make room to weave, keep it loose…' he ordered. 'Five- a customs ship?'

'Long range light turbolasers. Designed to overmatch the average pirate- the rebels turn it into their version of our Lancer. Advice; that's our target. Who else can deal with it, if not us?'

Gamma's Hunters were fleeing the beaten zone, most trying to escape forward into the furball where the rebels would fear friendly fire, exactly what Lennart's plan had been in pushing them on. Two had been lucky enough just to lose shields, but three had gone. Two ejections.

The destroyer behind us, Aron thought. 'I'm not up to speed on Starwing doctrine yet. Five, you lead in.'

'Epsilon squadron, accelerate to attack speed.' She acknowledged by taking charge.

Lennart turned to the navigator. 'Brenn, opinion. We sneeze at that corvette and it goes away. The rebs then know we have more function than they thought, and fail to follow up or hit us much harder. We don't, we lose a lot of fighters. Hmmm?'

'Protect the wing.' The navigator said instantly. What Lennart had intended to do anyway.

Turret 4-Port;  
'Oh, come on. Suluur, any actual reason why we aren't weapons free yet?' Aldrem complained.

'We're playing dead so that bigger targets come along.'

'We're not going to have a fighter wing left to do it with unless we give them some support fire.' Aldrem was exaggerating, but the armed freighters with their military- grade turrets were doing a lot of damage.

'Port-4, this is FireCon. Do you have a bearing on the corvette?' fire direction called, at last.

'Bearing, firing track and death wish all lined up, FireCon, say the word.' Suluur reported.

'Blow it's shields out, the skipper wants prisoners.'

'A greatsword to do a scalpel's job-acknowledge.' Aldrem said. He could bitch and track a target at the same time.

'Shield rating on that thing?'

'Twenty-eight- it's been reinforced.'

'Fendon, step sub one down to output thirty. LTL yield, why one of them can't do it-' snatching seconds out of the fire routine.

'Fighters have still got to go in after the bastard thing and ionise it, I know we're supposed to be more accurate but not that far below standard, has anybody told them to keep clear yet, if we're not supposed to be able to do this then our jammers had better stop them getting the word out, ready- firing now.'

He depressed the trigger switch. The result depressed the rebels. A single ripple salvo from the quad turbolaser, thirty thousand terajoules a shot- trivial by it's design potential, but enough, aimed in a shallow tracking diagonal across the line of flight of the customs corvette.

One hit. There was a thin, soap-bubble-breaking flare around the corvette as it's shield generator overloaded and collapsed.

Firing into the melee around the three transports was much more risky. He activated Sub Two and took one full power shot at the least encumbered of the three freighters.

It was effectively a snapshot. No warning from the fire control, just the instant continental hammerblow shattering it into glowing gas. The tracer may be below the speed of light, the bolt was well beyond the speed of comprehension.

'Useful.' Franjia's comment. 'Squadron fire order- objective Corvette.' It flared up on Aron's targeting panel, she was designating it for them.

'Weapon torpedoes, subcomponent target; turrets. Fan salvo. Director identifying.' The way she set it up, each of the six twin turrets had four torps, from four different fighters, homing on it. Must be a preset. He had used missile systems before- on an Interceptor, they were a rare aftermarket modification, poorly integrated.

On the Starwing, his targeters cut through the rebel's jamming in less than a second, and- first time in coherence with the rest of the squadron- launched his first pair of torpedoes, one, switch, two.

'One, standard procedure on an attack run is if a fighter loses shields, it breaks off and circles to recharge for another pass- procedure also says we provide our own top cover, the circling element covering for the rest. You're the interceptor pilot.'

'I'll take the cover party. Epsilon two, three, four, conform to me.' Aron acknowledged, and led his flight in a wide decelerating sweep, eyes in the cockpit, letting his wingman cover him while he looked at his sensor display.

Ship for ship, the Imperials were superior this time; the corvette had ignored the Avengers, though, it and the freighters had concentrated on shooting up Hunters and Interceptors. Beta One had ordered his squadron to chase down the X- wings and Gauntlets; the Gauntlets were proving tougher targets.

Turret fighters, pretty nimble and no blind spot, they needed to be hit from two directions at once, and the rest of the rebels were running interference trying to prevent that happening. Com traffic tagged the corvette as the rebel flagship, it was the one directing the rest. Probably they would move to protect it- preventing that would be his problem.

The local cylinder- fighters were fast but clumsy; they made a run, broke off and tried again- but they had a huge gun battery, eight light autoblasters or something like, spraying out huge geysers of orange- red light that splattered off an Avenger's shields, wore down a Hunter's but sheared an Interceptor to fragments. The Hunters had one torpedo tube each, so they were trying to hit the rebel freighters. Both sides' plans had come apart, and actually his squadron was the largest formed unit on either side.

He looked for a shot; three of the cylinders had just finished a run on a pair of Avengers- one of the Avengers was wallowing- and they were turning for another go.

'Two, with me.' Aron went for them in turn.

Lock and launch a torpedo- targeters and jammers made too neat a pair, it usually took long enough to get a lock that the situation had changed by then, but the bomber electronics on the Starwing made it easy. Follow it in- the cylinder saw it coming, tried to turn away, but its drift carried into the torpedo's flightpath. The proton warhead left it hot gas, and Aron charged in behind his missile aiming for the right hand cylinder.

They managed to slide round to bear, flying tail first. 'Two swap targets- I go low.'

The firestreams leapt out of the cylinders too little too late; he slid under and his wingman slid over, stray red-orange sparks splashed off both their shields, there was the muted thunder-crackle of heavy laser fire as Aron snapped out four twin bolts. Green impact flash, yellow-white fireball.

Two wasn't as good a shot; he crippled his cylinder, cut thrust and was pivoting to have another go when an Avenger came after it and stole his kill; one of the Gauntlets lobbed a torpedo at the Avenger, that dipped and Aron took a long range shot at the Gauntlet, which neatly sidestepped out of the way and fired another at him.

Power output, rapid fire - no time. He lined up on the torpedo and started shooting at it, one managed to connect and the torpedo blew, the sensors behind him showed the Avenger double shields aft, seem to take the hit - damaged but not destroyed, then the engine block sparked and the fighter shook, the Avenger pilot punched out. He lost the Gauntlet in the furball.

He accelerated after Three, Four and the rest of the squadron; watched as one of the Gauntlets came in in a rapid crossing tangent across the front of the formation, hammering at them with both it's guns; Five and Six dipped to match it's vector, yawed to bear and sprayed fire at it. Five switched to Ion, hit and paralysed it, kept her finger on the trigger switching to Laser- set up her own sitting duck. Nice; he'd have to remember that trick.

Two of the cylinder bombers were attacking the port edge of the squadron attack line- he found the right button and pressed it, marking the lead of the pair as his target.

The Ghtroc was moving towards the corvette, but Hunters were harassing it, preventing it using its guns on the Starwings. He'd deal with that later.

Two followed him, Three and Four were lined up on the other bomber, both the rebel cylinders started lobbing unguided light missiles- Aron laid his guns ahead of his target, started ripple firing, Two, Three and Four did the same, aiming for the missiles first and tracking back to the bombers. Ten, Eleven and Twelve broke to evade, Nine throttled back to cover them, one of the bombers ceased fire and turned to break- his target. The other, Three and Four coned and blew apart.

Aron banked after the retreating bomber, switched to ion cannon, hosed sequential fire around it, it started tumbling out of control-

'Break lead break.' Two called, Aron slammed the fighter into a diving twist, red quad laser shot screamed past flaring off his after shields, he yo-yo'd up to see an X-wing zooming high being chased by Two.

The X- Wing half-rolled into a head on pass with an Interceptor, neither imperial could fire, the X-wing missed and hurdled the Interceptor, but the Interceptor pilot nearly rammed Aron- the Starwing sideslipped out of the way on pure reflex before he consciously realised he had to dodge.

I'd forgotten how much fun furballs aren't, he thought, looking for the bomber and lobbing a torp at it before anyone could steal it, then turning back to the squadron.

The torpedo spread had hit the corvette, and there were six glowing lumps of wreckage where twin light turbolaser mounts had been. Some of them had been stopped, but not enough.

Now it was ion time. Makes sense, Aron thought, they surprised us this time, we want to grab someone who knows what other tricks they might have ready and introduce him to Mr. Painful- that didn't make it easy.

The Ghtroc was angling it's shields to keep the Hunters busy while it turned guns to cover it's command ship - that was their opportunity.

'Lead flight, ions, from the front, that Ghtroc.' Two for the price of one.

They flew the same scything attack pattern, build a vector then ride it, strafing across its nose - a fast three seconds of close enough contact for reliable shooting, they twisted and weaved to throw its aim off, it shot back at them - Four's shields collapsed entirely, and he had two glowing holes in his fighter's wing radiators; Aron took two hits, soaked- the Ghtroc took four long columns of blue bolts, it reeled, lightning crackling across it. The Hunters could finish the job.

'Formation change, Four takes lead, we cover.' That was so they could cover the now vulnerable Epsilon Four's rear; he dumped what weapon energy into shields he could, Aron did the same with the ion power bank, switching back to lasers.

'Head for the rest of the squadron.' Bearing marked on the sensor globes.

They had swirled round the corvette, ionising it and then some. Aron didn't envy the boarding party.

That done, Epsilon were watching each other's backs, scanning for threats and opportunities. There were more green blips than red, now.

The rebels were losing, their tactic had failed, and they seemed to realise that fact. They started to look for ways out of the furball, avenues to clear space.

'Five? Bomber tactics query here. How do I say "blow the stang out of that freighter"?' He spotlighted the remaining YT- series, which was running for hyperspace. It glowed on his scope, and his headphones beeped. Like that, then. He lined up on it, switched to torpedoes, triggered a shot with the rest of the squadron.

The freighter saw them coming - somewhere over on the left, in front of third flight, an overeager Interceptor pilot got himself crisped by blundering into one of their torpedoes - one score against.

Not their fault. The freighter spat laserfire at the torps, doubled shields aft, twisted and tried to roll out of the way. Six connected.

A YT-series was perfectly capable of being souped up to carry turbolaser- resistant shields. Some had been. Not this one; its shields flared and collapsed, it limped into hyperspace. Damage, not a kill.

What wasn't dead already, the Avengers were finishing off.

Rescue and boarding ships were a long time launching; apparently when the main guns had fired, the lighting in the forward hangar bay had had a seizure, and the station's and the tender commander's shuttles had managed to collide. No injuries, much wreckage.

Epsilon squadron got to stand sentry over the disabled and wait to cover the boarding and rescue transports.

'Delvran, your eyes have glazed over. You're thinking about her again, aren't you.'

'Captain Lennart, I-' Dordd began.

'Many hats. I have to be a part-time everything, so will you, and that includes relationship counselor. The counsel I'm giving you about this relationship is; don't.' He was prepared to joke about it, as long as it wasn't too serious.

'And why should I not?' Dordd said, drawing himself up to his full height. Which was a lot.

'Delvran, you're basically an organisation man. You relate to your superiors, you relate to your equals in rank, you relate to your juniors, competently, normally- you fit in. Command of your own's your chance to grow out of that mould- live up to the ship's name.'

Lennart smiled; HIMS Dynamic. 'She isn't; white armour or not, I recognise a lone wolf when I see one. I should know; I'm in a relationship with one myself.' He waved an arm at the structure around him, meaning the Black Prince. 'She'll eat you.'

'Assuming there isn't going to be a rebel comeback, the earliest I can leave is once the chaos on the pad gets sorted out. That gives me two hours.'

He spent ten minutes of them packing, twenty pacing up and down, stomach in knots, before deciding to take the risk. He invited a stormtrooper to dinner.

She probably had a clearer idea of what was going on in his head than he did. She decided to play with him a little.

His actual quarters were close to his duty station - damage control central, above the main reactor bulb, and not far from stormtrooper barracks.

She turned up at his door dressed in her environmental body glove. Slick, black, figure hugging - he nearly collapsed on the spot from sheer excitement.

Pull yourself together, he thought, before realising there were at least two very wrong words in that statement.

'You requested my presence, captain.' She said, voice rolling over him like liquid honey.

'Yes, yes, come in, sit down.'

She flowed through the space around her like black mercury; he could not tear his eyes off her hips, her thighs, her belly. It was too late to avoid looking like a lust-struck fool.

'Captain Dordd,' she said, changing mood and tone drastically - bitter and defiant, putting one foot up on a chair, 'you far outrank me. If your only purpose in requesting my attendance on you was to satisfy your lust, you can order it so, and I must lie back and think of Coruscant. From a separate chain of command, I have nothing to gain by pleasing you, and you may remember my ranking as a field interrogator. Shall we drain a cup of misery together, or may I go?'

'Why does it have to be one or the other? Can't I simply talk to you?' he said, baffled, confused, disappointed and hurt.

'Is this normal enough to be simple? Are you trying to tell me that you want to get to know me as a person?' She could have made that much more barbed than the words suggested.

'Sithspawn, woman, why are you using my rank against me?'

'Do you command me to explain?' that did reach into open mockery. 'I'm sorry. As a person, that went too far. But I am assigned as part of a hunter-killer squad. Do you think I don't notice eyes following me?'

'I'm sorry too - I admit to the lust. At least give me credit for realising that that alone isn't enough.' He was almost pleading. 'Stay and eat with me.'

Somewhere in the small part of her head she used for passing for a civilian whenever duty required it, a simulated personality was rolling on the floor laughing. She bowed to him and sat down in the chair. Dordd's steward had barely believed what was being asked of him, and had made a very scratch job of cooking for two. CHON synthesis or not, arranging the stuff was still best done by hand; although this time done very badly.

'Ah.' She said, taking a deep sniff of it's scent. 'Roast Bothan. My favourite.'

The unidentifiable brownish lump with the purplish sauce could have been nearly anything.

He met her eyes, and she noticed he was nearly ready to burst into tears or chuckles, or both. 'This was crazy. I don't know why I thought it made sense.'

'I knew it didn't. Somehow, I ended up here anyway.' She smiled.

'What do I call you? OB173 just doesn't capture you.'

'For any of the real veterans, names are equipment, issued as needed, and the name I like best is the one that has served me best: Aleph-3. You have the same problem, former commander Dordd, your name is changing, and that's going to change the person under it more than any of mine ever changed me.'

'Tell me about yourself.' He asked the nightblack-clad woman of his dreams.

'You do realise that I'm a clone?'

'I can't believe there's more than one of you. The universe would have noticed. Jorian said so, but-'

'How he knows is a topic in it's own right. I was designed as part of a limited production run, to fill certain support functions; liaison with civilian authority, army spokeswoman, internal communications - I was to be a finger of the velvet glove covering the iron fist. Or a glittery flash of distraction, covering the approach of the blade…normal training as well of course, but by the time I reached a useful maturity - Hail Palpatine.'

She was been sitting leaning forward with her elbows on the table, fingers steepled together, watching him react. She straightened, sat upright in the hair, suddenly less intimate.  
'The glove torn off and thrown away, my clone sisters and I had to find a new purpose for ourselves. Not easy; some of us failed to rise any higher than what I expected you wanted me for.'

He wanted to reach forward and touch her, but he wanted to do that for so many other reasons as well, he was afraid she might tear his arm off. Vulnerable, she was not; she had faced that fear and beaten it. 'Others entered various branches of the service, became aides and adjutants, analysts and supply officers; I found a more special task.'

'When you were talking about the rebel spy, you said something about injustice.'

'Sometimes…when we are doing our proper jobs, I am the face and voice of the hunter team. I ask, "what do you know? what have you seen?" I smell out lies, find trails, follow leads - the best justice we can hope for, I think, is simply that; being given a fair chance to make use of your talents. Some of the talents I have, I was given, even the ones that nearly condemned me and I would perhaps preferred not to have; the most I have really done with face and figure is preserve them - the talents I have worked for and earned, those I am proud of.'

She paused for a moment, pulled her mind's eye out of her own past. 'Yourself, Captain Dordd? What gifts has fortune given you, and what traps has the pitiless bitch arranged? I succeeded in clawing my way out of a pit; you're about to enter the top trillionth of the most powerful people in the galaxy.'

'I think one of those traps is sitting across from me now.' He smiled at her. 'I did well enough at the academy, no second M'thh'raw'nurundo though - few are. I think I must look better connected than I am.' She resisted the impulse to tell him that the way he looked at her made him seem entirely disconnected.

'I was lucky, right place, right time, and at least enough of the right man not to drop the ball. I worked my way up through the deck division, navigator on an Ecliptic and exec of a Venator before being sent to the Black Prince, five years ago now- as a safe pair of hands and a counterbalance for Captain Lennart, I think. I always got things done neatly, cleanly, on time and within norms - this, sitting here with you, may be the first really off the bulkhead thing I've done since the academy.'

'It took the captain this long to corrupt you?'

Gradually, she got him talking about himself, explaining and trying to justify. She was a good listener, he was under a lot of stress, he opened up to her completely. It was, in its own way, a triumph of the interrogator's art. He was besotted with her.

The steward came in to clear the hardly-touched plates, and also to pass on a message; the pad was clear, wreckage removed. Time for him to go.

He looked at her, dewy-eyed, and opened his mouth. Quickly she reached across the table and placed a finger on his lips.

'Don't say it.'

He looked desperately disappointed. Heartbroken.

'Delvran…' she said, slowly, 'what would we do, when I am alone and unmasked, with nothing to do except work through you? Whatever my good qualities are, I assure you I have badness to spare. I think we would come to loathe each other, in time. Yoked together, on the edge of the deep dark, probing and twisting and manipulating - and I would have to stow away to go with you, don't forget - what would happen in our first lovers' quarrel?  
Go and take charge of your ship, and accept all my good wishes to go with you, because I cannot.'

She stood, walked out, leaving an image of herself burnt on his minds' eye.

From the bridge, Jorian Lennart watched the transport go.

'Omega- 17- Blue- aleph 3.' He tapped in the access code he wasn't supposed to know, and called the cloned woman he hoped was still aboard his ship.

'Yes, Captain Lennart.'

'Delvran escaped with his life, then.'

'There would have been little challenge in it; the other main factor was that you said you would have me shot.'

'I owed him that much covering fire, at least. That and I don't think you would have enjoyed being Pirate Queen of the Outer Rim.' Lennart said, dryly.

'Captain Dordd's dark lady, the power behind the command chair - you don't think I wasn't tempted? Perhaps it was this ship that would be sent after us to bring us to heel.' She said silkily.

'Another reason to stop you - Imperator against Arrogant would be no challenge at all.'

'There are two men on this ship I would joyously accept a command to bed from…'

'And both of them have far too much sense to issue it, OB173. Be about your duties.'


	4. Chapter 4

The probationer cowered at the far end of the corridor, looking at the snarling, crackling mess.

A junction in the power web had overloaded, partially melted, and the work team was standing a safe distance away looking at it, working out what to do.  
He was the only officer, it was his responsibility - he didn't have the experience to point a petty officer at the problem. They were looking at him; he had to do something, he needed something nonconductive, he started to take his jumpsuit off-

'Freeze, spacer,' a large voice said from behind him. The eight strong work crew turned round to spot their hairy boss.

'Ah, sir?'

'You were about to try to do something heroic, weren't you? At risk to your own life and limb, etcetera, did it for the ship, etcetera, and hoping to distract me from that your taskbooks are drekh.'

'Commander, I was trying to shut the node down.'

'The power distribution node has melted, probationer. Two other nodes failed when the compensators came back on line, and this one got too much load too fast to break circuit cleanly. The thin layer of contaminated carbon you were about to smear all over it wouldn't have helped.'

As he talked, Mirannon was assessing the situation. The intermittent blue-white glare did very strange things to the look of his beard.

'Where's it arcing to?' he asked the raw young lieutenant. There was something familiar about him, Mirannon knew he ought to recognise the young officer, how had he made himself noticeable? Eleven thousand in the engineering department. He couldn't keep track of everybody.

'Um, nearest main structural member?'

'Correct, closing a circuit to the main reactor bulb, as you would have known rather than guessed if you were up to date.'

Mirannon turned to the leading member of the work team. 'Tiffy, you are supposed to tell him when he's being an idiot. When were you planning to stop him killing himself?'

'Sorry, Commander,' the leading mechanical engineering artificer said. 'Didn't realise anybody would do something that dumb. I'd have stopped him before he got to it.'

'Procedure; you look, here,' Mirannon pointed to a panel set on the wall and labelled with what the probationer thought were hieroglyphs, 'for directions to the nearest routing station, go there and shut down the node. The routing station's droid brain should be smart enough to bypass around it, but you may have to do it manually if the network has been, say, recently ionized. Someone forgot about that, which is why this one has acquired a new function as a probie-zapper.'

'Aye aye Sir, at once Sir-' the probationer turned to go.

'Then,' Mirannon fixed him to the spot with a shout, he wasn't getting out of it that easily, 'you go to the nearest DC bunker, draw a replacement, come back here and fit it, taking what's left of that down to Main Machinery sub-2 for reconditioning. No, you're not allowed to get electrocuted in the process.'

'Chief, the tender commander's here looking for you.' One of his assistants called him.

Then send him to the sick bay for ointment, Mirannon briefly thought of saying but didn't. He had just gone to the Damage Control bunker himself, pushing his way past a heap of newly returned portaconduits, to look for the next outstanding problem that merited his attention. There were supposed to be limiters that kept the team that normally occupied the bunker focused on their area of duty; his access code overrode them and he called up a full ship status display.

'Send him to DC starboard-45.' Shield unit which had lost synch, blocking fire outgoing as well as incoming. That would be the next problem worth seeing to.

'As well, chief, three stormtrooper squads called.' The assistant was new, and didn't believe the message he had been asked to pass on. 'They said you must be bored, would you mind if they hunted you down and shot you?'

'Business before pleasure,' Mirannon replied.

Starboard-45 was, as the name suggested, on the starboard side of the ship at Primary Hull Frame 45; what was primary was the frame, not the hull.

The system counted from forward aft, which meant that if Mirannon had his way they would need negative numbers. Secondary hull frames filled in the space between the primary frames, which were set one every ten metres, and the DC bunkers- a smaller ship would have had lockers- also performed the routinely useful function of zonal maintenance centres.

Ventral-40 was the main maintenance complex for the shuttle and dropship launch bays, Spinal-10 was oriented towards the light turbolaser and point defence laser turrets clustered thickly in the prow of the ship. Dorsal-130 was ion drive accelerator routine servicing, Spinal-120 was a standing joke as it would actually have been inside the reactor bulb.

All of them were also hardened to act as disaster shelters if the ship broke up. Starboard-45 had no specific, only the general function.

The Sahallare's commanding officer found Mirannon looking through a rack of storage cabinets, searching for parts. He had narrowed it down to one of two possibilities, the shield unit wasn't responding to the fire window requests or it simply wasn't receiving them, in both cases it was a control problem.

'Engineer-Commander, um, Mirannon?'

'Me.' They were equal in rank.

'What are you doing with my men? You sent them back and kept their equipment.'

'We needed the hardware, not the wetware,' Mirannon snapped back, before deciding to explain. 'This ship's been seriously damaged and undergone major repair six times. Every time, she moves further away from spec. Which in some respects is no bad thing.' The Sahallare's commander looked poleaxed.

'Outer rim, nine years ago, one of those marginal species the republic knew about but could never be bothered bringing civilisation to. Nasty little battle, we lost most of our mid and after shielding. The FleetTechServ unit we linked up with were too scared to hang around; they replaced or improv- mounted where they could, spent the minimum time on the job and ran for safe space. We managed to repair and recondition some of the wreckage they left us with - six of twelve. Spare generators, spare mounts - we remounted them, shifted the panel layout, and your work crew didn't know that. They had our shield units treating each other as incoming fire.'

'Your ship looks like a wreck; naturally, my people assumed they knew best.' The Sahallare's commander stated, less arrogantly than he might after seeing some of the Black Prince's engineering team in action.

'The skipper has this idea about ships having identities and personalities. The computers, we prevent that, but the actual structure of the ship has enough complexity in it to show emergent behaviours. That and fuzzy thinking.' The chief engineer shook his hairy head.

'He reckons the ship's a berserker, a warrior proud of her scars. I make sure they're no more than skin deep- how much do you know about the design of the Imperator class?'

'What are you going to tell me that I don't know?'

'Quite a lot, I suspect.' Mirannon moved to the bunker's compnode, called up the ship status display. 'Main structure of an early model Imperator-I, hull number below, say, twenty-two hundred. What do you see?'

'A tuning fork.'

'We've got two separate sets of main ribs. One radiating forward from the ion drives, one radiating outward from the main reactor. Characteristic of a capital ship.' The double keel arrangement was what made the 'tuning fork'.

'There up to sixty-five hundred, double destroyer-weight ribs, sixty-five to thirteen thousand eight hundred, single heavy tetra structure with the reactor in central suspension. Thirteen nine hundred upwards, light tetra structure.' Smaller ship models appeared in the air next to the main model, the three named below, two more above; an original-spec Imperator, and a heavy destroyer-leader.

'Tensor field generators.' They appeared highlighted on the display. 'Multiple, distributed, redundant. Relative inertial fields- same again. Power network - parallel redundant, barring operator brainfarts, anyway. I don't know what the fuss about the Executor was; by any reasonable standard, the I-boats were already super-destroyers. We forget just how much of a new breed the Imperators were at the time.  
'Not pack ships like the V-boats, both kinds, not near-cruiser flotilla leaders, but heavy independents. The half-written tac manual did strange things to the technology, like a virtual pocket battleship hull frame. Sloppy design; they're overbuilt, the Imperator-II's are more elegant, more closely matched to the job - but every time we have a reason, I try to have Black Prince rebuilt closer to what the power systems and the hull frames can bear.'

'The port side of the ship?'

'Is as I want it; the problem is that I haven't had the chance to rebuild the starboard side to match. We were in company with the Notitior, a Vic-II, chasing a fleeing Rebel MC-40. The reb skimmed close to a neutron star trying to shake us, Notitior cut the corner too close, didn't have the vee to get past. There was too much shear for a tractor to be any use, we had to get under her and physically ram her to push her out of danger, with enough momentum to carry us clear if we did tear off an engine. We were badly but not essentially damaged, I took the opportunity for a major reconstruction; you noticed the portside turret line?'

'You've moved them.'

'Echeloned them outwards so they can all bear directly ahead. Why the Imperator wasn't built like that to begin with I don't know. Heavier brim trench weaponry, some of it our own recycled and some of it removed from the enemy. All of it stable enough and well enough served in use that it should have been set up that way. The ruined look serves efficiently as camouflage.'

'One other thing I wondered about. In the MCR, I overheard one of your juniors saying the stormtroopers wanted to hunt you down and shoot you?'

'Inside joke. Five thousand of my people and the legion were involved in boarding a Procurator battlecruiser, and the crew and the legion have covered each others' backs since. That's just their way of telling me they think I'm pushing myself too hard, that my judgement's going to start to suffer unless I get some rest. They might be right, I'm not doing anything a competent PO Artificer wouldn't. I have more than enough deputies to do it all.'  
Which meant he wouldn't stop for another four hours or so. 'That was fun, that day. Did you know a Jedi lightsabre is based on the same technology as a cutting torch?'

'No…can't say that I did.'

'High density plasma held in a stasis field…One half trained idiot and two quarter trained idiots, attacking me, an Imperial Starfleet engineer, in a starship engine complex, with glorified cutting torches. I think their plan was to get me to laugh so hard my brain would seize up. Didn't work. Ultimately, I think,' the display of the destroyer-leader, a V-sterned outline with a mid- mounted bridge tower, expanded, 'I can bring this ship close to the functionality of a Proelium destroyer squadron flagship.'

'That's ambitious. Very ambitious,' the tender's commander said, impressed.

'Of course, if you spread this story around, it will sound like the sleep-deprived ravings of a man who runs a ship that looks as if it tried to run away to the circus.'

The captain's ready room, Lennart at the head of the table, Brenn and LCdr Mirhak-Ghulej in attendance. Mirhak-Ghulej was a near-human, skin quite literally the colour of the metal bronze, not exactly standard imperial officer material. That only made him all the more zealous.

'At ease. Captain Dordd got out alive,' Lennart said, not entirely seriously, 'and now I need a new executive officer. Sector Fleet has failed to specify their own candidate for the job, which means it's in house. Mirhak-Ghulej, you're the outstanding officer in the deck division, Brenn you have seniority. The other factors I have to bear in mind made the choice.' He paused for a moment, watching them react. Brenn was suspicious of Mirhak-Ghulej.

'We are not the most average ship in the Star Fleet. We do our best for the Empire, and that best sometimes turns out to be more and stranger than the Empire expects. One unofficial position in the chain of command is what you could loosely call the 'Ambassador of normality'; someone whose job is daily routine and established norms, who can remind the rest of us how much, or how little, the fleet expects. Ielamathrum Brenn, do you think that you could fit that description?' Lennart's tone made it clear he didn't think so.

'If you don't think I'm up to the job-'

'Executive officer, you could do; straight man, no. Barring accident, your next posting- I will try and find a spot for you in local sector fleet, as commander of a strike cruiser or frigate-class starship.' That looked like a mixed blessing to Brenn.

'Lieutenant-Commander Mirhak-Ghulej, you achieve your efficiency record at a price; you're the most hated man on this ship. There have been a long string of practical jokes played on you, some of them rough enough to justify an assault charge. I will back up one of my officers, but there is a lot you could do to reduce your status as a target.'

'Sir, I am not going to hide. I want things done the right way, the Imperial way, and if some of them can't hack that, they don't belong in His Majesty's service.' Mirhak-Ghulej could have temporised, but that wasn't his style.

'Let me rephrase that. When I said "barring accident", I meant "if you get fragged". It has happened to unpopular officers before. Seldom on this ship, mainly because I also discourage my officers from offering the crew that much provocation.' Hazing was routine, but generally not above Lieutenant's rank.

'Then may I respectfully inquire of my commanding officer why I have been selected for a job that he has no intention of allowing me to perform, Sir!' Mirhak-Ghulej replied - forcing the issue, trying to win himself a free hand.

'Because, first, you were the previous incumbent's recommendation, and second, if I move Brenn up, than I have to find a new navigator in addition.' Lennart was only half in jest. 'You have to recognise, and punish, infractions of discipline; you also have to recognise, and reward, competence and dedication. If you can only do one of those things, then you're right; you shouldn't be allowed to perform the job. I think you can do better, and you're trying to snow me.'

'Captain, I admit to being orthodox. I admit to following the regulations, to the letter.' He obviously intended to go on.

'Follow them to their spirit instead; you'll have a better life,' Lennart said, apparently mildly.

'Discipline has to be maintained. That means enforcement.' Which was the party line.

'What do you want from a career in the Navy?' Lennart asked the metal-faced, impassive lieutenant-commander.

'Sir?'

'Some of us are in this to see the galaxy, some of us because our homeworlds are pestilential hellholes, some of us for the excitement and some for the money, some for the skills they intend to pick up to carry them into civilian life. I joined the Republic fleet to defend justice and right - and when Palpatine proclaimed the empire, I took one look at the ship's turbolaser batteries and three milliseconds to decide which side of them I wanted to stay on. How about you?'

'I don't understand. I would need a reason to not serve the Empire.' The near-human said. 'Every loyal, good and true citizen should look for a way to put their talents-'

'You sound like a COMPNOR recruitment poster,' Lennart said, grumpily. 'I've read your file, read your reports, examined your defaulters, and there is only one hint of an actual individual I've found under it all; you must really, really want to be here, to submerge whatever you are so thoroughly under the official position.'

'I just want to be part of something greater than myself, to stamp out the forces of evil and chaos, sir.' He said, utterly, impossibly deadpan; nobody could come that close to the official line, he had to be a rebel agent, Brenn was thinking.

'Good for you,' Lennart said dryly. 'Let me remind you of something; upwards of eighty percent of Imperial defectors to the Alliance were under threat of disciplinary action at the moment of their defection.' Lennart wasn't making that statistic up.

'All that proves, Captain, is that the system works. We weed out those unfit to help maintain peace and order.'

'Or create them. Treat a man as a criminal, he might as well become one in earnest. You can manufacture rebellion.' Lennart paused for a moment.

'We're both over-reacting. If you were that tactless, you wouldn't be up for promotion. This crew scores well above average on most benchmark inspections, they need to be led rather than driven. You have to inspire affection, not for yourself, but for what you represent - at the very least, don't piss them off.'

'Sir.' Mirhak-Ghulej's face was expressionless.

'Test case for you; Group Captain Olleyri. O-equivalent higher in rank, beneath you in chain of command. He takes over fighter direction when he's not flying himself. We have controllers for that. Concerned about his pilots, yes, but isn't that concern more efficiently served by letting those whose job it is get on with it?'

'I see, Captain. I'll take it up with him at once.'

'When you've done that, tell him to come and see me. Second test case; Turret-master Aldrem. Exceeding his orders, this time.' The second shot on the YT.

'He exceeded; he succeeded. What's to punish?'

Lennart nodded. He was wrong about that. 'Leave ship operations to me.'

Three quarters of an hour later, Olleyri turned up in the ready room.

'Ah, good, come in. The new XO talked to you?'

'If he ever tries to take this ship away from you on account of your disregard for uniform regulations, don't be surprised.' Olleyri wore a uniform that was almost as wrecked as Lennart's; less inherently out of place, but it had been rumpled, crunched up and sweated into many, many times.

The starfighter force commander was in his late thirties, average height but painfully thin, as if nervous tension had shaken all of the fat off him. His hair was going grey from forward back, and his cap should have been shot for dereliction of duty.

'We need someone like him.' Lennart declared.

'That far up the chain of command?' the pilot shook his head. 'What's the problem?'

'Generally, what we expect to happen next. I'll hold another round table on that one. Specifically, your squadrons' antiship work, and Epsilon squadron. They only had two flights of even average quality fighters; the small ships did the majority of the work for the rebels, Gamma tried to counter but they were improvising. The Hunters could function as light strike fighters, if the pilots knew attack doctrine.  
Epsilon's the other problem, and they may be able to solve each other.'

'They did well.' Olleyri said.

'Because they had an experienced attack pilot in charge. How much did you have to tell them to do?'

'Virtually nothing. Rahandravell led that one, not the new man- the command situation there could become a problem.' The group captain said, thinking about open billets elsewhere in the wing.

'I checked; Jandras is an Interceptor pilot, used to light, fast fighters. He would be perfect for Gamma, except that he's no attack pilot. Franjia could do either, but giving her Gamma would leave a prime fighter-bomber squadron in the hands of an effective rookie.  
The best long term solution would be to keep him in Starwings long enough to learn the trade, and then give him the Hunters and let Franjia take over Epsilon. If they can work together.'

'I'll fold Gamma and Theta together in the meantime, break out the reserve Hunters and rebuild Theta when we have a chance. I'll talk to both of them.' Olleyri decided.

'Good. And Ol? Do as many sim exercises as you like as a controller, just not when there's live shot in the air.' Both of them knew that he was old for a pilot, his reflexes were slowing, and his next posting was likely to be as a senior controller on a carrier or battlewagon.

'Yee-hah.' Aron shouted, vaulting out of the cockpit of the landed Starwing.

'We were lucky.' Franjia called across to him.

'How do you mean that?' he had the sense to ask.

'We exploited chaos; coming with a formed unit, still able to manoeuvre, into the middle of a furball. Someone else on our side, Gamma and Theta squadrons, paid a high price to create that chaos.' She reminded him.

'Yeah.' Aron realised. 'Beta lost two fighters, one pilot, Gamma lost five fighters, three pilots, Theta…they got raped.'

'Seven fighters, five pilots. We're claiming twenty-five out of thirty-two Rebels, all pilots casualties - sixteen dead, nine prisoner. A freighter and a customs corvette. My personal score is two, yours three. Beta claim the majority of the kills.'

He looked across at the panel below her cockpit. That would take her personal score to thirty-one; and his to twenty- four.

'We're part of the Bomb Group; on an anti-ship strike, we are the ones who make the mess to give the TIE Twin-Tubs their chance.' She meant TIE Bombers. 'Today was a good day. Other days are not so good.' She was back in ice maiden mode.

Yrd was waiting for them on the pad. 'Squadron Leader, Franjia.' Did he mean that the way it sounded? Aron glared at him. 'The group captain wants to see you both. Alpha squadron ready room.'

'Immediately?' she asked.

'That was the impression I got, yes.'

'All right-' she began.

'Flight Lieutenants.' Aron called them both to order. 'Adjutant, lead us to Alpha's ready room.'

Yrd looked at her, she nodded, he led them along the flight bay, up, through Epsilon's bay, and through a monochrome maze of storage, access, blast-trap and function chambers. It was, in fact, a shortcut. Aron thought it was a runaround.

Grey, black, white walls - once the surrealistic sight of a stormtrooper standing against a white bulkhead, all that was visible a pair of eyes, a few black patches of bodyglove and a blaster.

Alpha's bay was laid out the same way; the decoration was different, a full holovid wall in the rec room - half a dozen pilots using it as a shooting gallery - more flash, more chrome. Their adjutant, who flew as Alpha Two, waved them into the ready room.

'You did well out there.' Olleyri told them. 'Both of you.'

'Sir?' Aron stalled.

'I was in flight ops, and I can practically hear the air between you crackling now. You wouldn't be fighter pilots if you didn't have more ego than was good for you.  
Jandras, you did well to give the main responsibility to the person best fitted to discharge it. Rahandravell; you picked that responsibility up so fast it needed relative-inertials.'

'Sir, I saw what had to be done, and asked for permission to do it.' Franjia replied, stonefaced.

'Indeed.' Skeptically. 'Can't have a squadron with two squadron leaders.'

'What do you want, have us strap into a pair of Starwings and fight it out?' Aron asked, aggressively.

'That would be one solution. The winner gets the cost of the loser's fighter stopped out of their pay.' Olleyri suggested. Both of them stopped to think just how much a Starwing cost.

'Why are you assuming there's a problem, Sir?' Franjia said, sounding utterly disingenuous.

'There will be. You led the squadron, not Jandras.'

'I know why the Captain didn't want to promote me after Ezirrn got killed, and with all due respect, he's wrong. I may be a little unstable off duty, in the cockpit is the one place where everything becomes clear again.' She said, humbly, sincerely.

'You haven't been appointed to run the squadron. I have.' Aron told her.

'Peace, the pair of you. This is the plan; Gamma squadron needs a new boss as well. They tried to fly as light strike fighters and got hammered for it. Jandras, you're going to move from Epsilon to Gamma as soon as you know enough about the bomb trade to lead them as a fighter/attack unit. Rahandravell, you move into Epsilon command slot when that happens.'

'Easier said than done.' She said.

'You mean I'm to understudy one of my own flight commanders?' Aron shouted, at the same time.

'Yes and yes.' Olleyri outshouted both of them.

Several tense but uneventful hours later; the command team, including Mirannon this time, gathered in the ready room beneath the bridge. Mirhak- Ghulej looked as if he wanted to have a team of cleaners following the chief around and sanitising everything he touched, if not the man himself.

'I tempted fate last time,' Lennart began, 'by saying there was no way the Alliance could get a force large enough to be a threat to us together faster than we could be ready to meet them. They tried anyway. Gethrim, what shape are we in- and how much rest have you had?'

'A couple of hours. A Stormtrooper spec-ops team found me and threatened to stun me to sleep unless I hit the sack. They said you authorised it.' It was impossible to tell if he was grinning or not.

'I authorised no such thing.' Lennart said, wondering whose idea that had been.

'They're getting sneakier every day.'

'Counter-terrorism ops.' Lennart said. 'Ask them to think sneakily enough to outguess Rebel saboteurs, you end up with a lot of clean, shiny white helmets with warped, twisted minds inside - be happy they work for us.'

'If I hadn't been so tired, I would have called their bluff. Which proves that they had a point.' The engineer admitted.

'If this ship was an orgophone, she would have twenty-five keys out of tune. Engines are fine, compensators - we're now clear up to two thousand 'g', the RIF fields start interrupting each other after that.'

'We can maneuver, but we can't chase.' Lennart stated.

'Tensor fields are fine. Stasis generators are twitchy. I'm not even going to try to explain what happened to the number five hyperdrive motivator.' A lightbulb went on in Mirannon's head; that was where he had come across the probationer before.

'We can microjump with ten minutes warning, not less time, no more distance. Shields, weapons, interactions between, ninety- six percent confidence. Stores and parts, seventy- four percent.'

'The other four percent?' Lennart meant the interactions.

'Bow and bow- ventral shields are still up to 70ms slow to accept fire window requests. Two more hours to find and fix.'

'Guns, work round that if you have to.' Lennart ordered. 'The rebel survivors have been interrogated; they were supposed to be part of a combined strike. From the lack of laser fire in the area, I can only assume they've gone back to the drawing board.'

'Details?' Brenn asked. Wanting to show he was still part of the ship.

'They actually screwed it up. The fighters were supposed to hit in time to draw the local defence wing and system reaction squadrons out, with the freighters and corvette appearing five minutes later. Instead it was barely forty seconds. They cut their timing and positioning too close, we got more warning from the bow shock, and had more formed units outside the melee and able to react, than we should have. They planned to bomb, not seize, the V-150s, that would open the way for assault ships that would proceed as we expected.'

'What went wrong?'

'Com procedure. Whoever was in charge of the regional command units set it up so that a failure to communicate would be taken as an abort signal. We have the local force base, fallback points, regional command's rendezvous- that'll be changed by now. Sector Fleet have been informed, and they intend to deploy a Demolisher frigate; they've asked us for heavy fighter support.  
'The only reason not to - gut feeling. The primary threat hasn't gone away. It was a well planned strike at a valuable objective; I think they'll have at least one more try before they write it off. As usual, decision is mine, I want your input towards it.'

'Are we still looking at a light to medium warship strike?' Guns asked.

'No indication that any of the strategic reserve MC-80s are involved. Almost a shame.' Lennart grinned fiendishly. 'Bulk carrier and various Republic leftovers and defectors. They never shot at our shields, the rebel survivors know that we have jammers and one main turret operative,'

'Reminds me - Aldrem's in sickbay.' Guns said. Reproachfully.

'Sleep deprivation and hallucinations, yes?' Lennart assumed, correctly. 'He did a lot to frighten the rebels off. It was a damn' good shot, damn badly timed. Drilling him until he dropped was a suitable punishment.' Lennart stated, for the benefit of Mirhak-Ghulej.

'On the other hand, several of the rebels had a bounty on their heads. He'll get the taker's share of that. Deployment- either operation could be a non-event. Worst case; both go live simultaneously.'

'Demolisher's mainly a light carrier type.' Brenn said. 'Any help going, they need it more than we do.'

'Squadron of Bombers, half squadron of Interceptors, two and a half of ln.' Olleyri reported. 'Decent troop complement, more than enough to cover that side. Send two of ours - Alpha and Epsilon. We can call Beta, Gamma, Delta and Nu if we need reinforcements. How much of that bounty goes to my pilots?'

'Usual split.' One quarter to the personnel directly involved, one quarter split between the indirectly, one quarter to command- primarily Lennart and Olleyri in this case - and one quarter to the ship. 'How's the slush fund doing?' he asked Brenn. It was nominally the paymaster's job to manage and the XO's to oversee, but Brenn was best up to date.

'Pretty healthy.' It was used for, amongst other things, bailing out sailors caught short of the law on shore leave. 'We have enough to, for instance, pick up three squadrons of Rebel-type fighters on the black market.'

'What an extraordinarily sneaky idea.' Lennart liked the sound of it, but could see the problem. 'Is there such a thing as a trustworthy Hutt? If you ever find one, we could triple the slush fund by selling the story.'

'We can welsh on a deal with more gigatonnage than they can.' Brenn stated.

'Leave extreme infiltration aside for the moment- make that very far aside. What more do we need from the Sahallare?'

'Motivator five. I'm leaving it to last because of the stasis generators, and so I can get the maximum amount of use out of the test rigs I borrowed from them,' Mirannon said.

'We can jump missing as many as three motivators, we have that redundancy.' Brenn, who should know, said. 'How safe is this indescribable failure, if that's what's stopping us?'

'The long version.' Mirannon pulled a datapad covered in scrawled equations out of a pocket and threw it to Brenn.

'Short version - the thing partially activated when we powered it back up. No tensor and stasis fields to anchor it to the rest of the ship, it went acausal, wobbled across the light barrier, and wrapped itself around its own world line. Damn thing turned itself into a closed timelike curve.  
Useless - totally self referential - and an anchor is exactly how it's behaving. We can't hyper cleanly with it on board. Straightforward replacement job, totally unrepairable with the available tools and time, only dangerous to itself so far.'

'I love that 'so far'. Get rid of it,' Lennart ordered. 'I want the tender ready to leave in a hurry if she has to. Ready Epsilon and Alpha squadrons. From 0445C on, we go on alert stations.'


	5. Chapter 5

Most of the gantries were still, to the naked eye and the casual scan, in place; from the outside, Black Prince still looked like a ship under major repair.

From the inside, fine tuning, trials, adjustment and compensation still to do, but the rough work was done and she was spoiling for trouble. Some of her people were, anyway.

Two fighter squadrons floated out of the bay, formed up, confirmed their hyperdrive coordinates. They would rendezvous with the sector force warship at their target. Olleyri's idea; look like part of the sector reserve, preserve surprise. Which he had a vested interest in, because he was leading the formation.

He had taken his most awkward problem with him: Epsilon squadron. It was Delta's turn, but Epsilon needed it more, and Olleyri would be happier to have them covering his tail anyway. Delta were more by the book, Epsilon, under Tellick's command, had treated the book as a launch pad rather than an objective.

That was what was wrong with too many Imperial pilots, according to the Group Captain; they weren't crazy enough. Too many flight colleges, and the one attached to Carida was the worst, turned out calm, thoughtful, disciplined, obedient servants of the Empire.

In the cockpit, a servant- of anything- was dead meat. Olleyri wanted predators.

That was one of the reasons the rebels depended so heavily on fighters- their propaganda appealed more to, and they got more of, the sort of people that made good fighter pilots.  
Command thought it was a materiel problem. Olleyri had no problem with them thinking that, as long as it kept the factories trying to one-up the Alliance by turning out things like his Defender.

Navigation on the Black Prince was plotting their jump for them, and as they did, the Group Captain kept an ear open for crosschattter between fighters- especially, between Epsilon One and Five.

He had told them the truth largely so they would think there was something else behind it; they would clash, and drive each other on.

He had more hopes of Rahandravell, actually. If, from the death of her lover, she picked up the right dose of cold fury in her heart, she could easily reach as high as Wing command, perhaps succeed him when he moved on to a carrier group. Treating Jandras as a problem might do the same for him.

Far off in the inner system, there was a hyperdrive- entry swirl; light hours away, they were seeing effects relayed by Black Prince's main domes.

'Group Captain, that's the Demolisher Raduvej away; your course mark is ten seconds from…mark.' Flight control announced.

'Alpha and Epsilon, you heard Flight; lock in, and activate in four…three…two…one.' Twenty- four fighters went to hyperspeed.

On board, the crew were now standing rotating one in three watches. Some features of a Star Destroyer's internal layout were immovable.  
Others were not, and one of Lennart's and Mirannon's reconstructs had been about breaking up the quarters block in the superstructure and moving the crew closer to their duty stations.

It meant that the forward turbolaser crews no longer got asked to do the three minute mile; that was the most extreme example, but it had improved readiness and response times. The fifteen crew of Port-4 shared a bunk room immediately beside their turret assembly.

'That's better. The walls are grey again.' Aldrem was sitting on the edge of his bunk, blanket draped over his shoulders, steaming mug of dwarf dice-melon juice in his hands. He had stopped twitching.

'We had them repainted green.' Suluur said, in just the right comforting-a-sick-friend tones. Aldrem took one hand off the mug, held it up in front of him, squinted past it, and gave Suluur a very black look.

'How do you two do it?' Aldrem asked. 'Stay up.'

'Simple.' Suluur said. 'You were the one that got the blame, so the drill was tailored to hit you hardest.'

'Changing power output at least one shot in three?' Fendon objected to that.

'I don't get it. Punishment and reward. Reward without punishment, stang yes, but not likely. Punishment without reward, I could at least get my head around. Neither means they've lost the file again. But both?' he shook his head, a bad move. 'Urgh. At least the space spiders have stopped crawling across the inside of my eyeballs.'

'No, they were alien bioships. That was part of the sim. You nearly melted sub-2 shooting at them, remember?'

'One windup is enough.' Aldrem told them. Suluur put the holoprojector remote down. 'How much does a good therapist cost?'

'By the day or by the hour? We're on wartime running, fat chance of getting anywhere near one.' Suluur was using a very loose definition of the term 'therapist'.

Brenn had wanted to see Motivator Five for himself; Mirannon took him there. The motivator unit was shielded, within it's own armoured sphere; it covered two decks, the casing was bolted directly to one of the main ribs of the hull frame, and there was what looked like the mother of all scanning units bolted to the sphere.

'Look at it with the naked eye, all you'll get is a migraine.' Mirannon advised him. 'Use the scanner.'

'How did we get this exotic an accident?' Brenn asked, looking at the scanner, trying to work out how to make it go.

'Because the built in factors of safety, and the active and passive safety systems, prevent all the simple ones.' Mirannon pointed out.

'Millions of things could go wrong, if we were daft enough to let them. This should have been preventable. My headache is going to be working out how this one managed to slip through.'

'You call one of the motivators turning itself into a solipsistic time machine simple and preventable?' Brenn said, not believing it. 'I'd hate to see your version of a complex problem.'

'Trying to fix it.' Mirannon said, darkly.

'Is there any use to it as it is? Anything we can do with it?'

'It's causality's a knot; I'm still trying to work out what can be safely done to it. The only think I can think of is to cut it loose, crate it up, leave it drifting and laugh at the Rebels as they try to pick it up and run with it.'

Brenn looked up. 'That has potential. Captain wanted rid of it, so-'

'Most of the through-deck hard patches are already open. Two minutes to jettison, thirty to fit and calibrate a new motivator to usability, ninety more to finish sorting the stasis fields, three days of juggling calibrations to get a rating above point three nine. Then another ten days of systems integration. Joy.' Mirannon grumbled.

He was protesting more than he otherwise would have precisely because so many of the systems that were giving him trouble were his own adaptations. 'The threat?'

'Not yet but soon, I think. There are other Starfleet ships in the system, nothing bigger than a frigate though, most of them out around Ghorn-IV and V. You're sure we can turn this into a glorified mine?' Brenn asked.

'Sure. DMR looked at something like it.' He motioned Brenn back, out of the way of the work crews that were disconnecting the scanner, unbonding the sphere from the hull spar.

'What do you have to do with the Department of Military Research?' Brenn asked, intrigued.

'The top twenty of my academy conversion class were offered the option.' Mirannon revealed. 'We were shown a few things, allowed to guess a few more, got to talk to some people.

Then we were addressed by one of its' section heads, and that put almost all of us off the idea. You might have heard of him, he's famous now. A guy called Lemelisk.'

'You met the chief designer of the Death Star?' Brenn could barely believe it. He blurted it out.

'Yes, and I'm surprised anybody thought it was necessary. His nervous twitch alone could have cracked the crust of most planets… Only two of us thought they could cope with that much pressure. They stopped him giving conferences after that, and neither of the two from my class have been heard of since.'

'Navigator, Gunnery Officer, report to the bridge.' The PA blared out.

'That sounds like things starting to happen.' Brenn advised Mirannon. 'You don't have a superlaser of your own hidden somewhere around here, do you-' he noticed a twinkle in the hairy engineer's eye. 'If you do, I don't want to know.'

'I'll release this and close up the hard patches.' Mirannon gestured to the sphere, now held in a tractor- clamp. 'Tell me if we've got time to fit the replacement.'

'Right.' Brenn said, running for the access corridor and the electrobuggy he had used to get here.

Lennart was in the starboard gallery; he waved Brenn and Guns across to the console he was standing over.  
'Does this smell as fishy to you as it does to me?' he called up a received message. It was a datadump, made through moderate haze.

'HIMS Syirdraev to Black Prince, we are reconnaissance conversion Strike Cruiser, being pursued by a rebel hunter. Intruder is larger, we are unable to engage, respectfully suggest we lead him past your position. Is your status sufficient to engage?'

'Syirdraev, that's a hunting lizard, isn't it? They must be reusing names, that should be KDY class 1000?' Guns theorised.

'That's a Syurdraev, with an 'I' it's a type of solar prominence, makes her a Nebulon-B.' Brenn stated. Even with all the galaxy's languages to draw on, there were barely enough words to name an entire navy. 'What's the rebel?'

Lennart called up the sensor footage. 'Fishy as a Hutt's rotting grandmother.' Brenn realised.

The image was a computer reconstruction of what was going on- the ships were too far away for tactical sensors. The Imperial- or the one with the green blip, anyway- was a heavily modified- looking Strike Cruiser.

Such things happened to ships converted to recon, and it was a logical choice, take advantage of the Loronar design's modularity; there were supposed to be a handful.

The professed Rebel was an old Starfleet Fulgur- class Star Frigate; five hundred and sixty metres, as near to an egg shape as it was a wedge, and engine bells almost the size of an Imperator's. The Fulgurs lived up to their name; they had an oversized reactor, too, and not enough weaponry to take advantage of it, nor enough shielding, but speed they had and to spare.

'Do they really think we're that stupid?' Brenn said, scornfully.

'You see something in this I don't.' Guns said.

'Naturally; you're interested in how ships shoot, he's interested in how they move. A Strike Cruiser doesn't have the power to outrun a Fulgur, however heavily modified it is. They only adjust so far. That is a pair of Rebel warships running a fairly interesting bluff.' Lennart decided. 'I think we pretend to take the bait.'

'They don't leave us many options, we couldn't catch either even in full condition.' Brenn said. 'Fifteen minutes and a massive overrunning vector, unless they start stunting.'

'They have to do something to us when they get here; they will. Tell Mirannon to get the replacement motivator in and the hardpatches sealed up as soon as may be.'

External com channel; 'Black Prince Actual to Syirdraev; We are well below optimum condition, but an undergunned fast frigate we can cope with. Herd her in. Black Prince out.'

'You're sure you're not overdoing that?' Brenn asked.

'Fairly sure, they are theatre command types. If they compared notes with the Mon Evarra, they'll know we're lying, but if they had I'd expect them to bring something bigger.

Right now we only have logic to go on, System Defence Command isn't necessarily going to respond well to that so send them an advisory, but warn the Sahallare and the Golan.' He told the comtech. 'Sound General Quarters.'

The coordinates the fighter group had been given for the Rebel local force base were a huge chunk of snow and ice far out in the cometary halo of a system called Thebune. It was the next stop over on the civilian nav maps, which described the mainworld as a flourishing residential planet, ecologically managed, pleasant scenery, rich and diverse culture. Instinctively Aron was suspicious of it.

Alpha and Epsilon squadrons emerged from hyperspace in loose combat formation, close enough for mutual support, far enough apart for sensor parallax, not too close to the target= enough room and time to react if there was anything waiting for them. The frigate- carrier Raduvej was far ahead. Well within the jaws of the trap.

'One, Five.' Franjia called him; infuriatingly professional. 'Capital ship targets. One large, two medium signatures.' Expecting him to pass it up the chain of command, becoming her messenger in effect.

The Starwing's sensor suite was more complex than a TIE's; there was a lot he couldn't do with it, and he resolved that he would master it if it killed him. Or her.

'Classify them. Alpha One, we have hostile capital ships.'

'I see them.' The iceballs were very large and very, very far apart; the nearest was a cosmic hairsbreadth at a hundred thousand kilometres, that and this slowly revolving round a common centre. The far comet had a ship half- hidden behind it, reactive scramblers returning nonsense to any active search.

Passive slowly pieced it together- 'Lead, main rebel target is Neutron Star class. Auxilliary carrier.'

The Neutron Star class were- once shorn of the sales blurb- basically protected cargo ships.

Armed and defended to resist piracy, the empire had retired them from fleet support, and was compulsory-purchasing and breaking up all the civilian examples it could- because when they were taken, the Alliance turned them into their equivalent of the Demolisher.

Everything about them was improvised; it was impossible to predict what any given example was capable of.

Scanning resolved two squadrons of T-wings, one squadron of X, one squadron of old V-wings. Interception heavy.

'They haven't brought enough bombers. Those medium signatures, probe for them, they'll be the ship killers.' Olleyri said. He led the formation towards the Raduvej to support her, at Starwing speeds.

'Forty-eight kills waiting to happen.' Alpha Two said.

'That would be pleasure, this is business. Rebs wouldn't be here in force unless they thought they could take us.'

Smenge, Aron thought. A rebel ambush on his second day on the job. All of his pilots sounded insultingly calm, and he was probably getting paranoid.

Olleyri seemed to be deliberately putting him and Epsilon Five against each other; he'd have to talk to her about that. If they survived.

'Got it.' Franjia said. 'Nebulon-B, and one unknown. Fighters moving to escort- Whoah.'

This Neutron Star, for instance, in addition to it's fighters had an extremely powerful main jammer unit. It snapped on and flooded a cone of space centred on the Raduvej with howling distortion, paralysing comms and navigation, crippling sensors.

'That's one of ours. Heavyweight Imperial EW equipment.' Rahandravell reported.

'If we could stop the rebs raiding our dustbins, this war would be over in a month.' Olleyri grumbled, thinking and bitching at the same time. What were they doing that blindness could serve?

Making it look like they were covering a retreat- while they were aiming for an Imperial scalp to hang on their wall.

Raduvej would press on, doctrine said so. She would send her fighter wing after the jamming, and they were outclassed.

Somewhere in the haze, the frigate-carrier's fighters were tangling with whatever the Rebels had put up; they could hear bursts of com chatter, rebel and Imperial, and it sounded as if the Rebels were winning.

Undisciplined babble, first names, nicknames, kill claims. Then a pair of X-wings cut across the formation's nose.

Epsilon had no shot; Aron broke into a climbing turn, Franjia into a dive, banking to catch the Rebs as they went by- if Alpha left anything of them.

The rebels reacted fast; one of them turned along the formation, firewalled his engines, and raced into the haze with a cone of green light snapping at his heels.

The other tried to sideslip and twist under, Olleyri caught him and crippled him with a snapshot quad, rolled onto his tail and finished him. Alpha Two ordered third flight to chase the fleeing rebel scout; they went to full throttle and peeled off after the X-wing.

Ten seconds later two proton torpedoes came out of the scrambling, followed by a flare that showed through. Epsilon scattered to avoid the torps; the rebel had deadfired them back down his line of flight, trying to catch one of the Avengers, missed. They got him.

'Hexagon formation, Alpha, Epsilon, we're going in. They've got a cruiser sector jammer.'

'And he wants to make me ask you for an explanation.' Aron said to Franjia.

'It covers a small slice of sky. We don't need to get close, we need to surround it, but the easiest way to do that is-'

'Get close.' Aron finished her sentence.

'First pass, target the jammer. Alpha strafe, Epsilon torps.' Olleyri ordered.

Epsilon's three flights were supposed to spread out into a triangle, one towards and two away from the enemy; Alpha would do the same in reverse, the two Avenger flights forward and flanking, the Defenders above and behind, ready to react.

The Rebel jamming seemed to be affecting their own systems; both sides got an unpleasant surprise. For the rebel, two squadrons of Imperial heavy fighters appearing at point blank. For the Imperials, the carrier's close escort. It was the Nebulon- B frigate.

The Avengers broke and evaded, twisting and dancing across the sky; the Starwings couldn't be that drastic. They needed to keep sensor spots on it to get a torpedo lock. They could pitch and yaw, but not much more.

'With me, on my target.' Olleyri ordered, the Defenders peeled off, dived under Aron's flight and raced ahead, the Avengers followed him.

He was aiming for the main sensor array; when the frigate got it's act together, it would start group- firing, directing all it's guns against one target at a time, swamping them in fire- two seconds a fighter, if that. Knocking out central sensors would at least paralyse central fire control.

The Starwings were bucketing through streamers of red light; if there was one thing Aron knew about the Starwing, it was how to throw it around.

He spiralled right- Two went the other way- faked reversing the roll, the rebel predictors shot well ahead of him, he twisted inside one line of fire, rolling and pulling up; had to slam the stick forward to get out of the way of Epsilon Four who had swung wide.

Epsilon were all doing the same; jinking and weaving- there were hits; one of the turbolasers put a bolt into Eleven, their shields were good but not quite that good. He fireballed.

Three took one of the defence lasers and lost shields, Six got tingled- then the Rebels realised they should be worrying more about Alpha squadron.

Olleyri went in suicidally close, trusting to his fighter's agility to avoid being shot- and the shields to take the blast of his own weapons. He and the rest of Lead flight were carrying torpedoes; he ripple- fired them all, as fast as his launchers could kick them out, and the others took his example.

Against a large target, it wouldn't have been enough. The continuous ripple of scarlet fireballs that kicked the frigate to one side and blasted a hole in her shields wouldn't have worried a Carrack, even, but Nebulons were lighter than that. Fighter pilots on every side loathed the things; and payback was sweet.

The four Defenders skid turned, soaring through the rolling blast wave, shields scintillating, and lanced streams of green and blue laser and ion fire through the local flaw in the Nebulon's shields. The shell of the sensor unit pockmarked, eroded, came apart; the soft tissue inside blazed.

The Avengers followed, swarming around the base of the Nebulon's fin, strobing ripples of laser fire into it, looking for the shield generator to turn a temporary breach into a permanent one.

The rebels were shooting at random now, defence turrets on local control; they were good at that, broke the shields on two Avengers, maimed a third, but the turbolasers were missing, scattering wild.

Not enough, not fast enough, not accurate enough. The Defenders were blunting vector, coming back for another run. Green blazes marched up the fin, smothering the turrets, reaching in, finding and smashing the generator.

Olleyri switched to ions, ordered his flight to do the same. Killing a capship was never simple. Disrupt it, strafe off the turrets, then try and smash engines and hyperdrive, stop it getting away.

Blasting a warship apart with fighter lasers was long, slow work, usually long enough for relief to arrive for one side or the other.

The frigate knew this as well as they did. It called for fighter support.

Epsilon- less one- were lining up for their own torpedo run. If anything, the huge sector jammer made it easier to lock on to the merchant carrier, its normal defences were compromised to fit it.

Aron- everybody- were constantly weaving, trying to avoid setting up a pattern; it's guns were sparking, medium antiship pieces as well.

'Four on, then break off for another pass.' Franjia advised.

The rebels were shooting like novice wegsphere players; all chasing the ball. Whatever seemed the easiest target, they would dogpile on- and that fighter went from partial to full evasive.

It was good tactics, by accident, but shoddy shooting. Either their predictors weren't working or their gunners weren't listening.

The Starwings showed them how it was supposed to be done. Lock on to the ship, twitch the pointer on to the subsystem, squeeze off a torp- break off as the gunners decided to play with you.

Burn back to get more time, accelerate in again-throw them off. Another torpedo.

Blast of laserfire to catch their eye, sucker them into going for you rather than someone more vulnerable- then curse your own stupidity as half your shields vanished in a haze of defence lasers and the stars blurred by as you frantically tried to dodge anything bigger.

Snapshoot the last two torpedoes, and accelerate to safety beyond effective gun range.

Aron broke off, shunted his shields to face the freighter, most of his flight followed.

Epsilon Four was in trouble. Three was floating backwards, trying to cover him, spraying laser fire at the rebel turrets- Four's engines were shredded, a laser hit had blown one out entirely and sent shrapnel through the other. He was jinking and twisting as best he could, but the rebels scented blood.

Four ejected, manually and, by the book, too soon; in fact, barely in time. The fighter took a turbolaser hit and evaporated, the pilot was out and floating, for what good it would do. They needed to win to get rescue sleds to the area.

Forty-four torpedoes turned out to be enough. The dorsal shield around the jammer blew out, lightning arcs crackling between the fragments of debris, the jammer took a direct hit; the distortions stopped, and they got a good look at the entire battlefield.

Raduvej was closing on the iceball with the rebel base; two flights of TIE bombers were orbiting it, there were a couple of individual, scattered TIE fighters, and that was it.

Four or five of the V-wings were gone, about the same in T-wings, but most of the red- blipped fighters were still there. Not good.

The base was empty; no jammers, no power source, no defence turrets, no anything. At best, the mission was a bust. The missing third rebel capital ship was about to do it's best to turn it into a disaster.

It was a freak; probably a one off. The engine bank looked freighter- based and running very, very hot; the outline of the ship- light plating, barely enough to carry a shield and mostly there for the look of the thing- was based on the Alliance phoenix symbol.

The only thing that stopped Epsilon laughing was the radiation it was putting out. Missile targeters- twenty of them.

Alpha one, Epsilon one. What do we do- support the carrier?' Aron called to Olleyri, urgent.

Raduvej was rolling to bring her guns to bear, activating her own jammers; good idea in principle- kill the rebel before it could get it's shots off.

Alpha could chase down the missiles, they were closer to the Rebels than they were to the Imperial light carrier.

Doctrine said losing unit for unit with the Rebels was good business for the many-times larger Imperial fleet. Ignore it and stay on target, trade the Neutron Star for the Demolisher.

'Black Prince, Black Prince this is Alpha One, we need support, send Beta, Gamma, Delta urgent.' Olleyri spun round to face the rebel strikeship and firewalled his engines.

Twisting and rolling to clear the Nebulon's zone of fire as they went, he invented his excuse on the way. This was a first time; if the rebels got away with it, they would try it again.

That flying abomination- they must have got the missiles from the same place they got the jammer, from an imperial navy scrapyard. They looked stripped off a Victory-I, and that was an awful lot of firepower in a small, cheap package. Perfect terrorist-mobile.

'With me.' Olleyri called Epsilon; they couldn't arrive in time to do anything about the missiles, but they could kill the strikeship.

'Five, situation;' Aron called her, tone dripping in sarcasm. 'We have two damaged but still shooting rebel warships behind us, one assassin ahead of us, and around three squadrons of rebel fighters on an intercept course.' Said while lining up and accelerating towards the strikeship.

'What does bomber doctrine suggest we do now?'

She laughed, briefly. 'This falls into the part of the manual titled "…or die trying." Seriously, missile engagement. Torpedoes you aren't going to get far enough to use if the rebel fighters jump you- may as well use them on the fighters. I suggest the T-wings, they'll be the most trouble once they get close.'

The turbolasers would carry far further than they could be aimed on small, fast targets; the rebel ships were still firing at them, blind grid patterns.

Franjia banked her flight round to a direct line between the Nebulon and the rebel T-wings; Aron realised, and followed her round. Long, shallow banks worked best to take them out of the patterns, one group of shot flew past them and crashed into two T-wings.

Which was good, but the last salvo put one bolt into Epsilon Eight. The shield unit held this one back for a fraction of a second- long enough to eject. Three fighters down. Krutz. The Nebulon and the Neutron Star lumbered round after them. It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous.

The X-wings had torpedoes to shoot back at them. Acceptable risk.

Twelve rounds each, four gone. Aron picked one of the T-wings, squadron leader by the look of it- his private game- and lobbed a torpedo; switched target to his wingman and fired another. Stop them covering each other.

Most of his pilots did the same; the nine remaining X-wings probably meant to lob a torpedo at each of them, but in practise they pointed and pulled the trigger. Aron got three; Franjia got two.

Switch to lasers, power to forward shields, set lasers to arghohmygodskeepitaway- low power maximum rate.

'Squadron defence order, and try not to hit our own torpedoes.' Aron ordered, lining up on one of the incoming and spitting a green hose of fire at it.

Those who weren't looking at hot proton death shot at the torps of those who were. Carefully; trying not to sideswipe each other.

Aron was actually a very good shot, when his heart rate- currently somewhere around the low two hundreds- didn't make his hand shake on the stick. Franjia was an excellent shot. She nailed her pair comfortably.

Aron didn't. He got the first easily and at long range, but sprayed shot all over the sky trying to pin down the second. By the time he did connect, the third was too close.

Couldn't out- turn it, not normally- he hammered it with a maximum intensity active sensor pulse and shoved the flightstick hard right at the last possible moment; blinded, it lost touch, went for where it guessed he was, and slid under his fighter's belly, tail flare close enough to tickle the shields.

On the other side of the balance, one torp hit wouldn't kill a Starwing with shields doubled forward- Six proved that, it happened to him- but it would slag a T-wing.

They shot at their torpedoes; single heavy guns with poor rate of fire. Dodged; agile as they were, not enough to out-turn a torpedo. Jammed; cheap light fighters pitting their electronics against top line Imperial strike bombers.

They could have done better, should have, but Epsilon weren't complaining. Eight hits. Eight less T-wings to worry about, and the rest scattered badly enough to buy time. Aron gave the target order.

'Five, take your flight after the X-wings. Nine, the V-wings, then whatever's spare. Good hunting, and we must be mad.'

Olleyri picked his moment; 'C flight, double back and deal with those T- wings.' Let the rebels be, just long enough to get them looking the other way.

The rebel was letting the Raduvej turn on it; because that exposed their hangar bay. Fire solution.

Twenty heavy bombardment missiles streaked out of their launch cradles and accelerated towards the frigate. Olleyri's defenders shot past the strikeship, trying to match speed and thrust with the missiles.

Raduvej spurted green light, antiship weapons on the strikeship- Olleyri's fighters had to dance out of the way.

It was maneuvering and returning fire from two turbolasers, dorsal and ventral turrets, slow and heavy- bigger than it really had the power to use, but it was shooting better than the frigate, scoring hits that weren't intended to kill but to weaken the shields. That would be enough.

The missiles had enough wit to realise they were being targeted. They began to jink, weaving sharp, drastic evasive patterns- even with four Defenders on their tail, not easy kills.

They only had to point on and the heavy missiles would dart away like touched salmon. It was real dogfighting work. Olleyri and Alpha Three got two each, but it took them three quarters the distance to do it- follow the missiles in too far, and the Defenders would join them impacting on the frigate.

Kriff, Olleyri thought, half of them are still going to hit- 'Break off, nothing more we can do.'

Last ditch defence salvos caught another two- eight impacted. The forward shields shimmered, bubbled, blew out, and the last two missiles hit bare metal, one of them detonated inside the hangar bay.

It wasn't a kill, but it was easily within turbolasing distance of one. The forward prongs were glowing white- hot and the main body of the ship had dimmed to orange- red after the fireball cleared, it was not likely anyone forward of main engineering had survived.

More than half the crew were cremated, and the forward defences and weapons were down.

The T-wings tried to accelerate past the Starwings to come round after them; Aron had picked a T-wing, lined up on it, lobbed a couple of ion bolts at it- then gone into a full power side drift and caught the wingman. Cyclic, all four cannon.

Ion and lasers hammered at the light fighter, turned it into a crackling fireball. There was another blast as Three made a kill on the approach, and then the T-wings were strafing past them and they were swinging round into the furball.

Two banked, Aron delayed a second, one of the T-wings lined up on him, he sideslipped on full throttle, started to tumble. Two shot at the T- wing and missed, Aron recovered.

Two shot past him with a T-wing lining up on his Starwing's tail, Aron rolled round after it, dipped to clear two from the line of fire, started to shoot, had a red spark smash into his shields.

Flip of the fire switch to grouped guns, a single shot that crippled the T-wing- Two could finish him- and break before the rebel could bring his fire back on target.

The rebel rolled with him, trying to turn inside each other. Aron had an unfair advantage; the T- wing was fast and agile, he was slow and agile. It overshot and desperately tried to dive and loop on to his tail, he took a snapshot, missed, and let it go. No time.

One more green blip was missing. Six; he had lost shields to a torpedo, and fuselage to an X-wing's lasers. That left two Starwings against seven X.

Out and drifting; the Starwing's ejection system worked, most of the time. The V-wings were outclassed and scattering, back to the cover of the frigate- then the Avengers hit.

A flight of X turned to face them, streams of red and green laser fire crossed, one of the Avengers and three of the X- wings went tumbling away blasted, the X- wings scattered.

'Raduvej, are you still under command? Crowd the bastard, block his way to hyper so we can torpedo him.' Olleyri called the carrier, leading his flight back into the fighter melee.

'Alpha, do what you can to cover the Starwings. Epsilon, we need your torpedoes. Stop playing with the rebs and get back to work.' Second and Third flights needed no further encouragement.

Two Starwings against four X-wings was almost a fair fight. Five killed one, the Avengers got the other three.

One of the T-wings made a suicide run on Aron; spitting fire at him, collision course.

Aron twisted, the Rebel pursued- last moment he slammed on full retros and the T-wing sliced past his nose, Aron pitched up after it and caught it in mid turn, finished it with another quad shot.

He was sliding round after another when a Defender danced in in front of him, rattled a long stream of fire into it exploding it. Aron was about to shout at it when he realised it was the group captain.

Suddenly there were a lot less Rebels around. Eight surviving Starwings- no, seven. Locking on to the phoenix- shaped rebel strikeboat was almost trivially easy.

It was shooting into the Raduvej, all it was achieving was making the wreckage twitch; even Aron managed to target it easily, and all seven rippled off their remaining torpedoes.

The Rebel was too eager for the kill; hung around too long. It's shields were thin, it's structure thinner- the barrage of torpedoes cut into it, blasted the defences down, ripped the hull apart. The engines exploded. No missiles.

'It's got no onboard magazines, it must have used cradle launchers, that's why it was working with a carrier.' Franjia suggested.

'So if we hit the Neutron Star really hard, it should go boom? What a time to be out of torpedoes.'

Three long lines of flashes; hyperspace emergences. Beta, Gamma, Delta squadrons.

'And what a time to be reinforced.' Aron said, wanting to do the job himself but knowing it was impossible. He sagged with relief. Imperial pilot's flight suits were very good at soaking up sweat.

'You'd be willing to charge two rebel cap ships with half a squadron of mostly shield depleted fighters? I suppose it looks good on the record.' Franjia replied, sounding scornful but not meaning it.

Counting odds- a carrier, an escort and a handful of fighters against two battered and three fresh Imperial fighter squadrons- it wasn't a winning fight for the Rebels any more.

Neither of them were badly enough damaged to be held from running away, and Epsilon were not sorry to see them go.

'Tell me the truth.' Aron called to Franjia. 'The real dirty secret of the bomber trade is just how often the plan goes to blazes and it turns into an incoherent, demented scramble, isn't it?'

'You worked it out; perhaps there's hope for you yet.' Franjia said, just as flippant. More seriously- 'Was this a victory or not?'

'Well,' Aron said, thinking about it, 'we did a lot of damage. For the squadron- probably. For the Empire- doubt it.'

'What kept you?' Olleyri asked Beta One.

'We have a situation back at the ship as well. Captain wasn't sure it was safe to let us go.'

'Wonderful. Now we get to sit here and watch that cool-' the Raduvej- 'and hope we have a mothership to go back to.'


	6. Chapter 6

The Quarters alarm sounded, surprising some.

'Urrrgh.' Aldrem staggered to his feet.

'Are you sure you can do this?' Suluur asked him.

'No, but I'm zorched if I'm going to let someone else make a mess of my turret.'

Fendon and Suluur held him up as they went up the companionway to the command compartment. 'If he wants to make a fool of himself, least we can do is help.' Suluur decided.

They practically poured him into the gunlayer's chair, blanket still draped around his shoulders. Dizzy as he was, he went through the drill of activating the turret perfectly, the hand holding a chillpak to his forehead didn't slow him down at all.

'OK, what have we got?'

'All hands, this is the Captain. We have one of our strike cruisers, a recon-line conversion, being pursued by a Rebel fast frigate. Apparently. I suspect both ships are in rebel hands, they are attempting to bluff their way to close quarters and use either heavy ion cannon or mag pulse mines on us, disable and hijack the tender. Both of them are flying evasive, and the Strike Cruiser is showing Imperial ID codes. Override that. Our margin, to hit them before they hit us, is thin.  
We will be manoeuvring as radically as we can manage- last second evade and counterfire. I'll give the fire call.'

'Captain, the Lancer is moving this way. It says it wants to offer support.' That was Lieutenant-Commander Rythanor, chief sensor officer.

'Shandon, has it been out of sight of either us or the system defence for any length of time?'

'No, but give me a moment…' he moved to one of the consoles in the pit, looked up the confidential reports. 'Sector fleet has a low estimate of their reliability.'

'This used to be a peaceful sector, things well under control. I think sector fleet got complacent, just about the same time as the rebs realised they were losing and threw in more forces to try to hold on to it. Bad combination.' Lennart shook his head.

'Either the captain's about to change sides, or he's dumb enough to bring a clutch of fighter-class weapons to a capital duel. Either way, it bears watching.'

'Or you could be overanalysing again.' Brenn suggested.

'You're right.' Lennart admitted. 'I'm starting to come down with Master Plan Syndrome. I wonder who is on the other side, though. Certainly Republic if not Imperial Starfleet trained.'

'Not much chance of taking him alive to ask.' Commander Wathavrah- Guns- gave his opinion. 'Fulgur and most of the recon conversions we've seen have been too volatile for their own good.' The gunnery officer would go down to fire direction control when trouble started.  
'The only Ion weapons we have available belong to the fighter wing.' he added.

'Which makes the Lancer's involvement interesting. How do we put her to the proof? Shandon?'

'No ID code that they don't have. I'll have one of the duty stations monitor her.' The sensor officer said. He was medium height and had a share of jerboa in his makeup, quiverish, darting, suddenly looking at things, always listening; it was one of the occupational hazards. Some devoted so much of their brain to the job that they had virtually no common sense outside it; like him, like the ship's chief medical officer.

'Flight Control? Get the wing in their racks, but hold them back until I give the word. Get the Legion's transports ready to fly, as well. Most of them are ion capable, if we can strip the shielding off that ought to work.'

The ship was at full combat readiness in two minutes; jamming suite up and in dampener mode - hide the fact that the Black Prince was as ready as she was.

Aldrem was leaning back in the fire control chair, eyes closed, listening to the hum of the turret around him; Fendon was watching him, worried.

'Do you know anything about the Fulgurs?' Suluur asked him, for effect.

'Not apart from the captain's instructions.'

'They were pirate-hunters in the old Republic navy; as fast as most of our fighters, they could easily take a Corvette or an armed merchant apart - but they went out of fashion in the Clone Wars, no good against their own size.

There are still a few of them doing recon. They're about right for the Rebellion - I'd expect them to try harder to get more of them.'

'Strafing a star destroyer? Are they cracked, or is it us?' Aldrem said, slowly, eyes still closed.

'Good. I thought we'd have to fire on central.' Suluur said. 'Seriously, Pel, get Gendrik or Hruthhal in here, post your brain as an Op-Def.' They were the chiefs of the sub-assembly crews.

'I can't, it's not Ulthsday morning.' Usually the morning after the night before. 'This is actually about all I feel fit to do.' Still without looking, 'Do we start tracking yet?'

'No.' The turret had a quasi-autoaim system, which could be run locally or from Central Fire Direction; the target's course was programmed into it, and it automatically tracked to follow. Setting that up and anticipating the target's movements was all the gunlayer had to do, and it was a very big 'all'.

There were sparks of turbolaser fire; the Strike Cruiser was sliding on the rim of the Fulgur's accurate firing range; just out of reach, occasionally getting stung by a light turbolaser bolt. It's shields were still in suspiciously good condition.

The Lancer edged closer; suspiciously unshot-at. Stunting, weaving- the strike cruiser, nearly overrun, flipped end for end, burned back past the Fulgur, crossed its wake; the Fulgur was round on it in a flash, raked it as it went by.

'Good thing about this is, we're getting a thorough picture of both ships. No hidden angles.' Rythanor said.

'Except the inside. If you could prove to me that the SC is in rebel hands, I'd be much happier about shooting her.' Lennart stated.

'I think I can.' Rythanor replied, suppressing the impulse to ask; suppose I told you I couldn't? 'Engine temperature. The rebels run hotter than we do, and although strike cruisers vary anyway, that-' selecting the best image- 'is at the upper end of the spectrum.'

'That fits the tactics.' He would have done it anyway, on his estimate of how it was being flown.

'Timing and bearing?' Wathavrah asked.

Brenn replied. 'They're shedding a lot of V, they'll overfly us at seven hundred KPS near as I can estimate. Drop the mines, retro-burn, move in and launch boarding teams, ten minute op if they're lucky.'

'When will they be in predictor range?' Wathavrah asked him; he had a rough guess of his own but the nav computers should be accurate to more than five seconds. They had been in gun range from the moment of emergence. Hyperspace sensors could detect a ship at transluminal speed, but it would be grid pattern fire; practical aimed fire range would be when they were close enough for lightspeed delay to be a minor problem.  
That had been one of the main reasons for the switch to the Imperator-II's gun fit; with more and faster- cycling heavy guns, it could lay down a barrage at more than twice the effective range of the Imperator-I.

'Doesn't matter. We open fire at three thousand.' Lennart stated.

'Kriffing near flash hazard.' Wathavrah pointed out; the big guns had a minimum range of two thousand, flare distance from a detonating HTL bolt.

'How many shots do you expect to need? We kill one, blow the shields off the other for the transports to deal with, then stand by to turn on the Lancer if our suspicions are well founded.' Lennart decided.

'Turning to bear?' Wathavrah asked; Lennart nodded.

'One simultaneous salvo into the prime target, ripple from the LTL's into the secondary.' Guns decided.

'Set your fire plan up accordingly.'

Wathavrah left the bridge to go down to Fire Direction; Lennart went to the bridge gunnery monitoring station, leaned over the operator's shoulder.

'Right, we have the data.' Suluur told his turretmates. 'Stang. Have you ever rammed a blaster's muzzle into someone's gut, stood so close you could feel their breath, then pulled the trigger?'

'What have I told you about getting into bar room fights?' Aldrem said, shaking himself awake. 'Point blank?'

'Full power, three thousand.' Dangerous; it was only blow-through that had saved Aldrem from baking most of the fighter wing with the shock from shooting the YT. If had been solid enough for the entire bolt to burst on, he would have scored about fifty fighter kills and a spot on the executioner's 'to do' list.

'I see what you mean, when do we start tracking?'

'At eight thousand, roll to bear, line up, simultaneous salvo.' Suluur said. Worried about Aldrem's manic grin.

'Bow shocks. Incoming rebel starfighters.'

'Damn them and their timing.' Lennart grumbled. 'Point defence batteries hold, track passive, open fire with the main salvo- if they know we're shamming, they're playing it very cool.'

'Eleven thousand.' Both Rebel ships were making their final approach on the port quarter of the Black Prince, slightly above mid- level, and far enough apart. The Golan was splashing fire in the direction of the Fulgur- it was sidestepping it almost contemptuously.

Revealingly, both their shuttle bays were open.

'Evasion burn, bring Alpha to bear, attack as planned.' Lennart demanded.

Two thousand 'g' was all Black Prince could manage at the moment. It was more than enough. The gantries shattered and were brushed aside.

The Rebels were not expecting that; nor for the huge, off-coloured, asymmetric wedge to roll and yaw round to leave them staring down the throats of sixty-four heavy turbolasers. The alpha arc of the ship; the zone of sky into which all her weapons could fire. Main and secondary targeters flooded them with light.

The Strike Cruiser reacted slightly faster than the Fulgur, breaking right, trying to escape behind the Destroyer; she was the primary target.

Fire Direction actually pulled the trigger. All the guns were pointed on, charged and ready, local control had handed over to central; sixty light turbolasers added their fire to the main battery.

It was instant, it was unexpected, it was devastating. For a moment the Strike Cruiser burned bright enough to outshine the sun. Glare dampers protected the gun crews. Aldrem looked down instead, at the hull blazing in reflected turbolaser light.

There were a few hundred thousand people on Ghorn III who would need replacement eyes, and a few more who would need replacement homes- what of the shockwave reached the upper atmosphere would kick off tremendous weather effects.

That firepower was endurable, over time; at once, it would cleave through the shielding of far larger craft than a mere Strike Cruiser- a frigate by the old scale in any case, and now a nothing, a veil of hot gas that would create spectacular auroral displays when it hit the planet. It just tickled the Destroyer's shields.

'Heavies hold fire, Light turbolasers pursue the Fulgur, launch fighters and transports.' Lennart ordered, ignoring the shout of 'Yippee-ki-yay-yahoo' from somewhere behind him in the sensor pit, and trying to control his own hungry grin.

The Fulgur dropped its bomb, and missed wide thanks to its own last second power slide; the blast from the mag pulse bomb was a mere tickle, the surge dampers overrode it at once. 'The Lancer?'

'Starting to bear away.'

'Order it to close with and support the fighter wing, Fighter Direction- warn the pilots that it's loyalty is questionable. Guns, have that thing tracked by the main turrets.'

'What? Follow but don't shoot - is it on our side or not?' Aldrem was thoroughly confused.

Suluur glared at Fendon, looked at his board. He was trying to signal with his eyebrows. It would have worked on one of his brothers. Fendon took a while to get it. He powered down the guns, just in case the gunlayer's finger twitched.

'Give me a moment…fire direction says, maybe. The way it's flying, it's captain must be a hero, an idiot or a traitor.' Suluur said.

'Two out of three says shoot it.'

'I'll remind you of that next time we're on Defaulters.'

The Fulgur needed to get to random shot range so it could initiate its hyperdrive; the clear run it required would be suicide if it was still inside accurate prediction. They couldn't miss it if it flew dumb. That meant it had to stunt like mad to get clear, and meant the fighters had a chance to catch it. It also meant the Fulgur would do everything it could to drag them through the line of fire.  
The Interceptors and Bombers had gone after it, one squadron of each racing ahead, wide of the green stream - the Fulgur maneuvered to cross their path. Doctrine was clear; the fighters scattered.

The experimentals were back protecting the Black Prince; one squadron each of Bombers and Interceptors was with and escorting the twelve transports.

The Rebel fighters were a heavy hit squad; squadron of B-wings, squadron of X- wings. They dropped out of hyper expecting to find an ionised Imperator and Golan; to have to paralyse the fleet tender then have the two ships drop troops on it while they chewed the destroyer and platform up with heavy rockets. Half that plan might still work.

The Sahallare had agreed to hold still as bait; that job was over, and it turned and began to run for hyperspace.

The Rebel fighters hesitated, picking their target; their flagship was in full evasion, chased by an Imperator. That simplified their choices. They ignored the tender, outran the Golan, closed on the Black Prince and her two squadrons of escort fighters.

The Lancer moved to intercept them. It carried an impressive array of fast-tracking, fast-firing anti fighter weapons; its shields had been optimised for rapid recharge, saved the power needed for that by being thin to start with. Dangerously lethal, dangerously vulnerable; the X-wings went for her.

'Hero and idiot, then.' Brenn decided.

'Two objectives safely met…She won't take rocket fire well, not well at all. What support do you think we can offer, consistent with the success of the objective?' Lennart knew the official answer.

Brenn failed to improve on it. 'Officially, none, this is exactly what Lancers are for, nearly their ideal deployment. We could pull Eta back, but vector, timing, I wouldn't expect them to be there in time to matter. Mu, Nu?'

'Against a squadron of B wings? We need the Lancer to cover them, not the other way around.'

The twelve X-wings swirled around the Lancer; it's guns slashing green lines of light out at them, their quads sending pulses of crimson in.  
They were stunting for all they were worth; they could afford to be drastic, it was a much bigger, easier target. They were throwing their fighters around like hummingbirds, darting in every direction, snapshooting at the Lancer whenever it swam across their gunsights. They weren't aiming to kill, not yet, but to paralyse and tie up; stop it shooting at the B-wings. Any actual damage was a bonus.

The two squadrons of Imperial oddities peeled off to confront the Rebel bomb element; hard to say whether they or the Rebs were more nervous.

'Central, the rebel fighters are being dumb. Let us shoot them.' Aldrem commed fire direction central. No reply. Wisely. Suluur discreetly blocked the com channel.

The Ravagers didn't need to fly evasively; they had a full-blown quad laser cannon in a second eyeball module piggybacked on the first. The kick from a grouped shot sent them nearly out of control anyway. They and the B-wings hit head on, the Ravagers jouncing across the sky, the B-wings in their trademark slow, controlled arcs; no B-wing casualties, two Ravagers splattered.

Fire direction was nominating one target, firing the LTL's that could be spared and all the point defence turrets that could reach at it, and them moving on to the next; flooding a cone of the sky with laser fire that no pilot living could dodge, or for that matter remain living in. It was a lousy, time-squandering way to shoot fighters, certain but very slow. B-wings were so few, it was justified- and the wing knew, when the defence grid looked at something and said 'mine', to get out of the way.

The rebel fighters were scrambling to hide behind the imperial fighters; the sort of furball that gave their technical deficients at least half a chance.

The Marauders were entering the fight now; their guns had been copied from a wreck dug up in a basement on Coruscant. The theory was that it had augured in, and afterwards they had just plated over the hole and put up a new towerblock. They carried four of what were officially called Variable Choke Space Combat Arc Saturation Blasters, but which everyone spoke of as laser shotguns. A real dogfighter's weapon, short ranged but accurate and, with a narrow focus, highly lethal. They were a great idea for point defence, and would go far, if the lumps of dreck they were strapped to didn't sink the project first.

They would take losses, but that situation was under control. Forward, the light turbolasers in the trench were standing down for want of a mission - the Fulgur's shielding was shredded. She had outrun her fighter cover, and what weapons she could bring to bear were shooting at the transports.

'Send the Interceptors- both units- in to strafe the turrets.' Lennart ordered, terse.

It achieved little, but it bought time; time for a long searching blue cone of ion fire, the collective output of twelve transports, to thrash around the sky, wash over the Fulgur twice before it actually hit and settled. Fighter ion cannon took a lot of time and shot to paralyse a ship; they managed it, just.

Six Stormtrooper Transports, six Assault Transports; they dispersed to points about the ship, maintenance and access airlocks, hardpatches. One STR went for the Fulgur's shuttle bay; one went for the softest available spot - the lifepods below the bridge in the small, early-KDY tower.

It opened the iris hatch to the boarding lock, thirty metres clear; six heavy rifles spat strings of burgundy-red blaster bolts into the lifepod cover, chewed through it, blasted the lifepod apart, shredded a usable gap in the inner retaining hatch.

Pressure curtains, locally and independently powered, came back on; but their way into the ship was open.  
Team Omega-17-Blue ditched the anti-materiel rifles; no use for sniper weapons inside a ship. They would be the second squad in. The Transport tractored itself in, locked on. Go.  
Speed was essential; there would be a minimal security detail on the bridge, most of them would be around the shuttle bay - where they expected to board from, not be boarded. Get in, secure it.

Team FD26 was first - shooting themselves in, blasting likely cover points, paving their way with clouds of fragments shot off the walls. Into the main corridor below the bridge, computer centre, ready and conference rooms. Fire element Omega-17-Blue-Gimel went to secure the computer centre; Beth reinforced FD25 setting up a perimeter, preparing to defend their gains against ship's security. Aleph led FD24 and 26 towards the bridge.

The emergency stairwell was defended by a handful of bridge crew, mostly with pistols, and four proper rebel soldiers; FD26 ran in to the base of the stairwell, shot at as they deployed, spraying fire back on the move, fragments off a wall knocked one down, a direct hit in the head dropped another; two of the rebels leaped up, screaming, one more collapsed forward, shredded by splinters from the bulkhead.

Aleph picked their moment; under cover of the line team's fire, single aimed shots. Each of the four rebel soldiers. Stun for the important-looking one, probably the ground force commander, on the bridge to coordinate; stun for his aide; the other two - fried.

Grenade; FD268 threw himself on it, Aleph-2 and 3 lobbed grenades of their own up the stairwell on to the bridge. Some units had almost a cult of versatility going on; any job, a blaster is the answer. The 276th (provisional 721st) legion took whatever advantages they could get.

Screams and a loud 'glorp', brilliant, eye- bruising flash; a 'slacker' - sound, light, and confusion - what an earlier age knew as a flashbang - and an expanding-foam capture grenade.

Team-26 held position, 24 raced up the stairwell behind Aleph, in the direction of the ominous 'vommm' sound, bursting through and shooting down what was left in the stairwell.

The bridge was a double crescent layout of consoles facing the main window panel, the grenades had landed between the rows of consoles; only four people were both free of the glop and not in shock. One of them was holding an emerald- green lightsabre.

24 raised their blasters - a combined volley would surely do - Aleph waved them back. He was their meat.  
The other three took cover and shot at 24, who laid covering fire and moved forward through the consoles; all, really, bystanders.

Aleph moved forwards around the Jedi, Aleph 2 announced; 'my turn'. Technically, he was right, Aleph-3 grumbled.

The young, grey-robed force user looked at them in astonishment, even more so when Aleph-2 dropped his carbine, drew a vibro-rapier and a stick.

Hand to hand with-? Ah. Materials technology scores again. The blunt rod gleamed, revealing itself to be of sabre-resistant matter. A phrik stick.

The Jedi tried a cheap kill, to start with; twisting lunge in on the rapier side - instantly pulled back, sabre caught and flicked away with the rod, step in and rapid up-and-under gutting shot for a riposte; lightsabre flashed down after the rapier, it had inertia and the sabre didn't - Aleph-2 jumped back, the rebel lunged in again, downward and outward parry- the lightsabre a centimetre clear of white armour.

High diagonal-downward stab, the Jedi had to twist awkwardly to get his sabre round- Aleph-2 drew the rapier back and reached forward cracking the Jedi on the wrist with the stick. Nearly enough to make him drop the lightsabre, not quite; enough to put him off balance - the Jedi leapt back, force assisted, too fast for anything more than a raking, grazing touch. Grey cloth fluttered to the ground, but no kill.

'Yes,' one of the spectating stormtroopers said - a woman's voice? - 'we are playing with you. We've been hunting your kind for twenty years. Your tools, your techniques, your training, your tricks - an open Holocron.'

Aleph-2 leapt up on to the next console to the Jedi; a green ampersand in the air, flashing blade blocked once, twice, thrice. A dextrous probe with the rapier, curling round the lightsabre, a block in the wrong direction; their very weightlessness could be used against them.

The rapier darted in, the lightsabre slashed out at it a fraction too slow, the rod seemed to make the same move; reaction, counter-reaction - the Jedi pushed the rod aside, and the rapier flickered in to slash at his forearm, laying it open.

'Your calm serenity is going to kill you.' Aleph-3 taunted him. 'Do you have the time to seal your wound? Do you have the skill to do that, and not take another?' The lightsabre hand drooped; the Jedi tried to transfer it from right to left, the stick lashed out at it, just too slow, the Jedi twisted the sabre down and out, slashing at Aleph-2; he leapt back - but managed to split the Jedi's foot open, with the tip of the rapier's blade.

'You need to kill us.' Aleph 3 said, calmly, poised. 'Your only way out is to wade in blood - you can't do that with a still heart.' The Jedi lashed out, telekinetically, at her; she slammed into one of the monitors, it came off worse, she pulled herself out of the tangle and brushed shards of duraplast off.

Now Aleph 2 was just playing with him; darting in, rapier behaving more like a blade of light than sabre - any well balanced blade can move too fast for the human eye to follow, any competent swordsman exploit a gap in his opponent's defence faster than the human muscle reacts. The Force was a powerful advantage - but not more powerful than years of training and bloody experience with weapons ancient and modern, practical and absurd.

'Hate. Hate is your only chance. Take the strength you need from it. Balance cannot triumph. Two, a minor organ this time.' The rapier came up to guard position, the sabre sliced out at it, the rapier tipped up out of the way, fell, darted into the Jedi's left shoulder.

The Jedi half-turned and lashed out wildly; Two ducked under the blade, stepped inside his guard, headbutted the Jedi breaking his nose. Aleph 3 shook her head in disapproval; Two improved on that by dropping down low and lunging for the Jedi's guts.

Under, the lightsabre dropped to block, flicker back and over. Straight to the liver.

The Jedi folded, writhing on the ground. 'See what good the Light Side has done you?' Aleph-3 walked over to him. 'Last chance; surrender, and we gift-wrap you and send you to Darth Sidious as a present.'

The poor fool started reciting the Jedi Code, in trembling voice; Two let him get as far as 'there is no death-' before slashing his throat open with the rapier.

'Another one for the trophy cabinet.' He said, picking up the lightsabre.

'Where does the alliance find these - these fools, these children?' Aleph-3 said, looking at the dead Jedi. He was no more than twenty years old. 'Don't they know how long it takes to make a warrior? Don't they train?'

'It's a big galaxy; it has room for a great many fools.' Aleph-1 stated the obvious, to them, and on command net; 'Bridge secure.'

FD241 asked Aleph-3; 'Why didn't you just blast him?'

'Too easy.' She shook her head. The fighting was basically over; command net reported the ship taken, a third of the crew dead and the rest prisoner, no major internal damage, ready to scrub the phoenix off and rejoin the Imperial Starfleet.

'Sometimes, if we play with them, we can drive them mad.' Aleph-3 continued. 'Less often, lately; he was one of the new breed, all guts, no brains. Six months' training, if that.'

FD241 looked shocked; that far on in stormtrooper training, you were still being taught to dig latrines. 'Still, if we wish for worthwhile opposition, we might get more than we bargain for.'


	7. Chapter 7

When all the to-ing and fro-ing was done, there were four ships hanging in space next to the Sahallare: a destroyer and two frigates.

The Raduvej and the Fulgur fast frigate, named Caderath in Old Republic service and now provisionally renamed Grey Princess, hung beside the destroyer. The Lancer, fore-structure ravaged by rocket fire, was next to the tender. The destroyer herself was rolled inverted, facing the planet.

There had been traffic: a Star Galleon under Strike Cruiser escort, to drop off the parts and fittings the tender needed to recondition the Raduvej, and collect the prisoners. The escort cruiser had not been at all happy about their newest kill splash - as usual, the crew drew lots to see who got the priviledge of painting it on.

The Galleon had also carried fighter replacements, enough to rebuild the existing units to strength and replace the squadrons they had given up on.

The two flight test squadrons had been badly mauled by the B-wings. That was hardly believable. There were some 'junior aeronaut' type fighters so light and so cheap they could be purchased mail order - for instance, the Zerflade Dart that made an embarrassingly large portion of Aron's score. Even they could usually beat B-wings. It was the group captain's decision, but the Captain's ultimate responsibility; Olleyri met with Lennart to discuss it.

'The numbers, I already know,' Lennart told him, straight away. 'Reasons and alternatives, I want.'

'They're not standard, and there's a good reason for that. They're fungus. I like having the experimentals around; they give us room to improvise, a doctrinal flexibility that matters more than having a crap fighter squadron. We need to keep some of them.'

Lennart agreed, broadly. Starfighter Force had a different set of mynocks in its helmet anyway. 'Which do we do without?'

'You mean, save the pilots from?' Olleyri pointed out. 'The Marauders are less worthless, but that's just the gun. A fashion designer built those things, not a flight engineer, kriffing flying wings. The Ravagers might just be the worst kitbash I've ever seen.' He thought about it.  
'On balance, we lose the Marauders. Call the gun a success, the spaceframe a joke, test complete. The Ravagers could work, with a gun that didn't take up half the total mass of the TIE, and they might make something of themselves in antiship.'

That was how elements of the fighter wing found themselves lined up on the main landing dock, mostly with sidearms. 'Testing to destruction' the notification had called it. Mirannon had been asked very nicely, and had agreed to raise the bay shields for the occasion. Epsilon were invited.

'Are we really about to do what I think we are?' Aron asked Franjia. He still resented having to look up to her, but that was daft. Prejudice usually was, especially reverse prejudice. Off duty, she kept herself to herself, coldly formal and more than a little distant; in a cockpit, even a simulated one, they worked well together.

'We took losses to numerically superior fighter opposition, an antifighter escort and a light carrier- and gave better than we got.' His score was now twenty-seven, hers thirty-four.

Five of the fighters had gone, but only two of the pilots. 'They were taken down by B-wings; it doesn't get more embarrassing.' There was already joking, shoving - one pilot nearly had his face pushed through the pressure screen. Everyone there had at least their regulation sidearm; some had two, a carbine or a rifle. There was a company or so of stormtroopers watching; they already looked amused.

The leader of the rout was a man in his undershirt and purple silk shorts, spiky hair, an expression that had given up grip on sanity, and a heavy blaster pistol in one hand, a stein in the other. He looked up at the ceiling and shouted 'Pull!'

Somebody called back 'Which end?' - but the ceiling drop chutes released a Marauder. At least, the stripped down remains of one. Most of its jets gone, it was remote flown in a slow spiral down the bay, and Nu squadron's survivors and ground crew opened up on it, whooping and blasting for all they were worth.

'They must really hate those things,' Franjia said, joining in - so did everybody else.

Aron shot at it as well, but he wasn't as good, couldn't pick out his shots from the hail of fire going in to it. 'Why are they so bad?' he asked her.

'Because those are so good.' She pointed - and had to shout over the crackle of massed blaster fire - at the Defenders, screened from this behind their layers of shelding. 'They're beautiful, but they're the end of the line. Sienar know they'll never be able to top that, so they're reaching; scrambling around for some way, any way, to take the TIE series forward. They've come up with a lot of bad ideas trying - count yourself lucky you missed the Intruder fiasco.' She winced, thinking about it. External missile racks, instant firepower but prone to cook off for as near nothing as made no difference. Even the solar wind could touch them off, the survivors had said.  
'Our test flight are due to return to Sienar for redesign to get the cost down; another test with a new model in two, three years perhaps. Until then, and maybe ever, that's the largest unit of Defenders you'll see in one place at one time.'

'How much?' Aron asked, prepared for an absurdly big number.

'Three hundred and eighty thou?'

'Eep…'

'Worth it, though. The Marauders, we're actually adding value to by reducing them to scrap.'

Both of them turned back to fire on the second hull being dropped down the chute. The shooting was wild, wild; from pilots, on their own two feet, what could you expect? The stormtroops- there to keep order if the flyboys started blasting each other, deliberately or more likely by accident - were now expressing as much contempt as silent, fixed masks could.

'You think you could do better, eh?' the purple shorts - Nu One - turned and shouted at the stormtroopers - still waving his blaster. The rest of Nu quickly dogpiled on him, before the stormtroopers could shoot him. He was in no real danger; most of them had done civil support duty, they could recognise a drunken idiot when they saw one.

An order was passed over the comnet; one of the squads formed up, marched to the edge of the bay, took aim and began controlled, timed fire - placed shots as rapidly as they could be aimed.

Flight control made it harder for them, spinning and twisting the Marauder hull, but it didn't help. There were maybe seventy, eighty pilots there, hitting as often as the eight-troopers-plus-sargeant.

A further order came down, from ship command this time; play up to it, make a bit of a show.

'If they could move like that without being stripped down, we wouldn't need to junk them.' Nu One - a bit the worse for wear after having what was left of his squadron sit on him - said.

'Are you all right?' Aron asked him.

'Ah, the glory boy. The hero of the hour.' Someone sensible had taken his gun away, but he was still holding the beer.

'What?'

'You wander in, straight to command a cracked squadron, while the rest of us slog our guts out in junk like that?' He reeled, glaring at Aron. 'Big interceptor bomber pilot.' He was balancing on the balls of his feet, spoiling for trouble.

'Garram, you're drunk.' Franjia stepped between them, trying to calm them down. He pushed her out of the way to get at Aron; Franjia stumbled back. Most pilots were arrogant enough to believe themselves great fighters in any environment, air, space, land, or pub, she was well aware she wasn't. Basic and passable, no more.

One of the stormtroopers saw it; stepped over to intervene. Three blindingly fast, white-handed touches to pressure points, and Nu One collapsed. The trooper hoisted the limp, pissed squadron commander over- her?- shoulder. The bulged chestplate was a glaring giveaway. Franjia had never taken notice of that before.

'Follow me.' Franjia told the trooper, headed for one of the maintenance storage bays on the side of the hangar.

OB173 dropped the drunk squadron leader at one of the benches, propped him up, Franjia planted two beers in front of him.  
'Not many women in the Emperor's service.' The Flight Lieutenant said to Aleph-3.

'I don't count; I was born to it.' Aleph-3 said. 'You surprise me, though.'

'Oh, the Empire recruits women.' Franjia sat down at the bench herself, took one of the beers. 'For the donkey work. Seventy-thirty on some worlds, you know that? Out on the Rim. Then the pyramid gets pretty sharp, pretty fast. O-3, there are maybe one in twenty left. O-6, is it closer to one in a hundred or one in a thousand? At some point in there, as you struggle through the incomprehension, malice, blatant sexism, being treated as a sex object, you realise that these people do not want you to fight for them. Or for yourself.'

'At least,' Aleph-3 said, 'you are not simply an object.'

'A standard flight suit's almost as anonymous - and half the time, I don't think they know what they expect of us.' Most of the time, the stormtrooper thought, she doesn't know what she expects of herself, which won't be helping.

'It should be 'we'. Even under arms for the Emperor, we're still a separate entity, they think of as 'other'. Lust, fear, jealousy, hate, confusion - and the most infuriating are the ones who nearly understand.' Aleph 3 said, with one specific individual in mind.

'I'm used to that for other reasons, but there's nothing else I could, or would, do. However awkward it is, I'm here.'

'However awkward…do you know what our adjutant told me? He lost a lot of peripheral nerve function, he's grounded - he said we were both physically unfit for higher command.' She had wanted to strangle Yrd, at the time.

Aleph 3 decided to go out on a limb. 'From what I've seen of the Empire's high command, that could have been a compliment.'

'Is there a red flag flying?' Franjia asked.

'No, why?'

'An old pilot tradition - back before repulsors, even. Atrisian Starfighter Corps, I think - not every day, but some, the red flag would be hoisted in the mess hall. It meant it was free speech time; you could say whatever you liked, even - especially - about the government, the people in charge. Blow off pressure, bitch to your heart's content.'

'Stormtrooper loyalty is - rightly - taken for granted; we are the trustees of the Empire, we keep the faith. We do not have to like or respect the people we're keeping it for. This ship is far better than most; I've served a good many idiots in my time.' Aleph-3 said.

'I know. I should save it for an assignment I really hate. But there are times…just when you think you've found a hole in the system, some way, some one, you can be woman and soldier both with, reality comes and takes it away from you.'

Aleph 3 wanted to keep talking, but she sensed something coming. 'Trouble.'

'What,' there was an enraged bellow, 'is going on here?' The bronze-faced exec, Anode Head to the engineering team, was shouting at the pilots; the stormtroopers snapped to attention, the pilots made some approximate pretense of it.

'Conduct unbecoming; unauthorised discharge of weapons; drunk and disorderly; unlawful assembly; destruction of Imperial property.' His voice rose almost to a scream at that point. 'Whose idea was this? Stormtroopers - arrest these -'

'Belay that.' A loud voice cut across the exec- Engineer-Commander Mirannon. He was more cleanly shaved than usual, and what of his face was visible was annoyed.

The pilots and troopers, and every spacer who was within earshot, listened. This was going to be fun.

'Chief Engineer.' Mirhak-Ghulej acknowledged him. 'Do you have something to do with this?'

'Somebody with a few grams of sense had better. Do you realise how absurdly serious a charge that is, to arrest half the wing on?'

'It is the charge that fits.' They were almost nose to nose, Mirannon more than half again Mirhak-Ghulej's bodyweight. 'It is the charge they lay themselves open to by their conduct.'

'Bantha poodoo.'

'I stand above you in the chain of command, Chief Engineer; you have no authority to talk to me like that.'

'You're junior in time-in-grade, and also apparently a halfwit. Maybe forty percent at best. Your writ doesn't stretch this far.'

'My responsibility is the internal discipline and economy of this ship. This is undisciplined, uneconomical, and clearly my duty to stop and punish.' The exec said, sounding as if he was quoting.

'I'd be more confident in that if it wasn't also your only apparent pleasure.' Mirannon snapped back at him. 'Are you so totally devoid of judgement that you don't understand why this is happening?'

'Meaningless.' Mirhak-Ghulej dismissed the stress, the tension, the fear of combat in one word. 'No reason for violating regulations is good enough, attempting to rationalise it an offence in itself.'

'Apart from the fact that you're wrong, DIP is a Category One offence, with a severe penalty.' Mirannon reminded him.

'The Empire has the right to execute those it feels has displeased it.' Mirhak-Ghulej said.

'Who here feels less comfortable about serving the Empire now than they did before our exec opened his mouth? Show of hands.' Mirannon asked the crowd.

Most of the pilots put their hands up; almost all the crew; Aleph 3 glared at them, and even half the Stormtroopers had their hand up - the one they weren't holding their blaster carbine with.

'There, congratulations, you've just won yourself a spot on your own death list as a - hypothetical - Alliance agent-provocateur. If you'd bothered to do your paperwork before coming down to flex your warped ego, you would have known that this is unconventional - but fully authorised. By myself, by Group Captain Olleyri, and by Captain Lennart. Those things are no longer Imperial property - they're imperial junk, being disposed of destructively in accordance with security regulations as befits their, former, classified status.'

Mirannon did a little looming of his own. 'The only person here, Exec, still staring down the maw of justice, is you. It would be wise for you to go away, before I have to start taking you seriously.'

'Are you interfering with the enforcement of the laws of the empire?' the frozen-faced exec tried to reassert himself.

'Angling for a confession to a cat 2 offence? I don't think so. What I am doing is protecting the law by preventing it being enforced frivolously and incompetently. I'd invite you to stay to the roast we're about to have, but I don't think you'd be welcome, and frankly, keep pushing it and you're more likely to be on the menu.'

'What about all the other charges?' Mirhak-Ghulej snarled.

'I don't support them. The disciplinary system on this ship is your responsibility; but all the others belong to me.' Mirannon growled back at him. 'I haven't had the chance to do any really creative plumbing in months - so go on. Annoy me.'

Aleph-3 knew exactly what he meant by 'creative plumbing'; she had been standing next to him when he had reduced a company of Alliance marines and a force user to loose carbon with a relative-inertial field.

Manipulating it to compensate for a non-existent acceleration had left them hurtling through the air at twenty-four hundred 'g', all a Procurator was capable of, and between that and air resistance - she had never seen an indoor meteor shower before, and profoundly hoped never to do so again.

The exec stalked out, furious - but also wary. The beer continued to flow and the remains of the Marauders were swept up by tractor beam, compressed into a bundle which, still glowing hot from blaster fire, was dumped on the hangar bay floor. Sparks scattered off it, the pilots jumped back, there was a brief fire extinguisher fight - the pilots complaining they couldn't tell when the foam hit a stormtrooper, the troopers treating that with the doubt it deserved - and the lumps of meat on sticks were passed round, to heat over the molten wreckage. It took some time for the mood to reassert itself, though.

Lennart was stuck in his office, sifting through personnel files. Intermittently he was looking up at, and cursing, the Fulgur.

'You sent for me, skipper?' Brenn.

'Come in, come in.' Lennart waved him to a chair. 'You heard about the incident in the flight bay?'

'I heard. I think the entire ship did. Halfwit.'

'He tried to exert his authority, and blew it. Spectacularly. When I told him he was in danger from the crew, I didn't think it was going to be Mirannon.' Lennart rubbed a hand over his forehead. 'That's problem number one. This is problem number two.'  
He called up the sector map, first level; the twenty-seven worlds of the sector that were worthy of the notice of the galaxy, and the standard routes between them.

'So far so normal, two indigenous alien species, one of doubtful loyalty, usual scatter of industrials. Give me a clue.' Brenn said; apart from the usual half-awake Republic surveys, there didn't seem to be much wrong, standard web pattern.

'Not fair, I suppose - upper right middle.' Lennart brought up the second level map, the worlds that featured in the sector's head count but were unlikely to impinge on the galaxy at large, the other two hundred and fifty-four. One of them had a very interesting name: Ord Corban.

Brenn got it straight away. 'How in the name of the force does an Old Republic fleet depot system, with enough vintage military equipment to equip an Alliance theatre group - and it probably has - get classified as a minor world?'

'That would be problem number three.' Lennart said. 'I had Chief Cormall do some digging. One of Shandon's signal-interpreters, and a pretty capable slicer. I have his report, but you would be better meeting him - so you know who to blame if half the ship's ready fund goes missing.'

The office door opened, and a prematurely grey-haired, round faced man, apparently impeccably uniformed, came in.

'Frevath, some people are built to wear a uniform, and some aren't. Lose the jacket.' Lennart, who belonged in the first category but insisted on dressing as if he didn't, said.

The shocked-looking chief petty officer did, searched around for a place to put it, giving Brenn a good view of the 'Boba Fett and the Assassin Droids - On Tour Deaf or Alive' T-shirt he was wearing under his uniform.

'There.' Lennart said. 'That looks more like a man with the illegal skills to crack into a high security datafortress.'

'Sir, don't tell my divisional officer, he'll - what am I saying? You're the Captain.'

'Not that you would guess it from appearances.' Brenn said. Lennart nodded to him to carry on, ignoring Frevath Cormall's suppressed chuckle. 'Where did you look, and what did you find?'

'Well, sir…how likely are you to be able to successfully negotiate an asteroid field?'

'Don't be daft,' the experienced navigator said, 'there's no way you can predict - oh. Actuarial data.'

'Spot on, Sir. I thought, well, if we do suspect tampering with the facts, we need to establish a baseline, work out what's actually going on so we can tell who's spinning what lies to whom. The sector insurers are usually a pretty good place to start for firm info.'

'And?' Brenn asked.

'Um- Sir, am I going to get into trouble over this?' Cormall asked Lennart.

'If you do, the rest of the ship won't be far behind you. Tell it all.' Lennart forced himself to say, suddenly worried.

'Sir, this sector's a much more dangerous place than Sector Group is admitting it is. With the records of losses and hijackings I've been able to put together, they've been under-representing Alliance, smuggler, pirate, all sorts of criminal activity by upwards of a hundred and fifteen percent, probably close to a hundred and sixty.' Cormall said.

'So we have at least one big lie from the hierarchy. The reason we're rolled this way is so our main guns can cover the planetary ion cannon.' Lennart revealed. 'Just in case they know that we've worked it out. Carry on.'

'Ord Corban got downgraded actually during the clone wars. The fleet based out of it did something crazy, something scandalous that the Republic hushed up and buried under very heavy security.'

'Would that be the hundred and eighteenth fleet, at all?' Lennart spoke from sudden intuition, with a shiver down his spine, speaking slowly and coldly.

They noticed. Cormall hardly had to say yes.

'Um, Captain, you're scaring me now-'

'Small bloody wonder, if what I think happened actually did. I begin to understand how the scam could work. Say on.'

'Well, I looked at some of the trade records, and there's a lot more top quality military hardware floating around the sector than local manufacture or known import accounts for.'

Brenn was not in the mood for an economics lecture, and Cormall noticed. 'So - to cut a long story short, the local bosses started selling bits off very early, and kept the business up under cover of the Republic security blanket. People - regimes - have come and gone, the families behind the scheme have stayed the same.'

'Actual collusion with the Rebels?' Brenn asked.

'Ah, now there the trail gets vague. What I reckon, Sir, is no; but the Alliance have done a lot of false trail work to make it look more like treason than graft and corruption.' Cormall said.

'Which is what, by now-' Lennart stopped himself. 'Chief Petty Officer, just how deeply do you want to be involved in this?'

'How deep does it get, Sir?' the slicer said, mainly to give himself time to think.

'Depends how far out into the murk you want to wade. They don't know, or at least if they do they are the boldest bunch of bandits I have ever even heard of. For that matter, neither do I, really, and I'm far from certain I want to.' Lennart said.

'So what's the worst case scenario?' Brenn, expecting something pretty horrific, asked.

'We find ourselves on the same hit list as the rebel "Heroes" of Yavin, at first estimate. If it goes back to the Hundred and Eighteenth Republic Fleet, even if it wasn't involved directly, that could involve digging into just how the Republic managed to turn into the Empire.

Not a subject a sane man with healthy survival instincts wants to learn too much about.' Lennart said, grimly, imagining telekinetic fingers digging into his throat.

'Captain, I think we want to keep a very healthy separation between problems two and three.' Brenn suggested.

'Still leaves us standing on a lava dome and throwing thermal detonators at each other. The scam-artists in the sector government must have some idea, but the Rebels can't know, otherwise they would be following it up, they'd realise there's far more political treasure on that planet than there is materiel.'

'All right, Sir, count me in.' Cormall decided, not sure why.

'Good. Wait here.' He went out to the com gallery off the bridge, sent a ship-wide alert; 'Commander Mirannon to the Captain's office.'

There were two reasons he could be summoned to the captain's office, and the big engineer had a case for either, or both; this was clearly another problem entirely. He realised as soon as he arrived.

'Good, you're here, I'll scream at you about the flight deck business later, I think we've just blundered into a world of hurt.'

'Typical.' Mirannon declared. 'Not content with my services, you go out and find more trouble for yourself - what is it, skipper?'

'We were tracking down how the rebels get hold of their ships, and we found it was from the fallout of an old scandal it would be unsafe verging on suicidal to inquire into.'

'Suggestion; don't inquire into it. Chase the ships, not the original screwup.' Mirannon had a very good idea what the problem was, Brenn could tell, and didn't want a better one.

'That's the consensus?' Lennart asked.

'You command an Imperator- class destroyer and you're asking for consensus? That's just how abnormal this business is?' Brenn asked, almost amazed.

'Yes.' Captain Lennart answered.

'I think I'd like to find out. I'd like to know. But if you're serious about the hit list as well...'

'At this point, believe me, I desperately want not to know. We deal with the problem at hand, Rebellion and Empire, right? Digging up the wars of the past - even if we were actually in them - is a step too far.'

'What do I do?' Cormall asked.

'Follow the trail forward, not back.' Lennart ordered. 'Gather data on anything and everything except the Republic security clampdown. True details for loss locations, cargoes taken, firms and worlds hit harder than others - find out, for first, if they have a line into Iushnevan Port Authority.' That was the sector capital.

Cormall saluted, picked up his uniform jacket and left, head buzzing with questions. He probably would have the sense not to chase too many of them.

'I'll call the rest of the command team, talk through the practicalities of the situation. First things first - Nav.' He called up the image of the Fulgur again. 'Life has no sense of timing.'

'No.' Brenn said, straight away.

'Thank you. Why?'

'If you make the offer and I turn it down, it's a major black mark on my record. If I accept, well, I'm probably not literally indispensable, but-'

'Close enough, especially at a time like this.' Lennart admitted.

'It's possible the rebs are blackmailing the Sector governor.' Mirannon pointed out. 'If this big dark secret gets out on his watch, what the Empire would do to him would be vastly worse than anything the rebellion could. Neither of them need know exactly what all the trouble is about.'

'So we have a rebel supply base, field manufacturing facilities and all, effectively protected by the Imperial Starfleet. Can you get Motivator Five back? I'd like to return to yesterday and do today over again, completely differently,' Brenn suggested.

'Rank has its privileges - me first.' Lennart said. Out to the com systems gallery again, to arrange for a general meeting of the command team.

They gathered in the ready room; Lennart, Mirannon, Brenn were there first, generating a little field of desperate seriousness and gloom. Wathavrah and Rythanor, Guns and Sensors, next in, followed by Olleyri and, unusually, High Colonel QAG-111. The commander of the ship's Stormtrooper legion looked less frozen-faced and metallic than the Exec, who sat at the foot of the table, as far away from Mirannon as he could.

'Gentlemen, all of our minor problems have just been reduced in size. We now have a major problem to deal with.' Lennart began, and motioned to Brenn to continue.

'Data from other arms of the Imperial service indicates that this sector is barely under Imperial control. The sector group's figures for Rebel activity are so wide of the mark as to be unbelievable, verging on mendacious.'

'Ah, I thought so.' Shandon Rythanor said. 'First line warships in first rate condition. Wouldn't be the first time they've had more than we suspect - wait. You're saying Sector Group are lying?'

'Open, bare-faced lies.' Lennart confirmed.

'Then what are we waiting for? We have some hyper capability, right? Straight to the capital, bombard them before they realise that we know, and present the evidence afterward.' Wathavrah suggested.

'Right, I'll go paint phoenix symbols on the side of the bridge tower, then.' Mirannon said, scornfully. 'It gets worse.'

'The reason they have been able to get away with it, is that the rebs are operating within the, metaphorical, blast radius of a political unexploded bomb.' Brenn said.

'Translate, for whose of us who aren't trying to learn doubletalk?' Wathavrah asked.

'The Dubbel people could probably sue you for defamation…' Lennart suggested, deadpan. 'There's a political threat to the Empire. The rebels don't understand anything about it, except that it exists. They are using it to blackmail the Sector Group into permitting them to present a military threat. It's working because the Sector Group expect to find themselves on Darth Vader's appointments list if it gets out.'

'The Alliance are using a political weapon, which they don't understand but Imperial Security does, to attack the Sector Group with?' Wathavrah tried to put it together. 'If they don't know what the big secret is - how?'

'Because they expect to be able to rely on mugs like us to do their investigative dirty work for them.' Rythanor suggested. 'Stop me if I'm wrong, Captain, but you've been very vague - is that why?'

'Yes. Whatever it is - we don't need to know. If we investigated, even with absolute integrity and discretion, there would still be enough fallout from it to give aid and comfort to the enemy. It's a secret the empire wants kept. Question is, how do we deal with the military problem, without exposing the political?'

'What is the military problem?' Olleyri asked. He was still slightly hung over.

The image of Ord Corban came up.

'I hate to say this,' Rythanor said, 'but I agree with Guns for once. Alpha strike.'

'Might not be the worst option - but what do we do about the turncoats inside Sector Group command?' Mirannon asked.

'Commander Mirhak-Ghulej.' The first time he had been spoken to. 'What does the book say you are supposed to do, if you catch your superior officer or officers in the act of betraying the Empire?'

The exec's response was entirely mechanical. 'Report them to their superiors.' Lennart wondered what he would find in his in-box about the flight deck incident.

'That will constitute plan A, we'll do it in any case. I want operation plans prepared for; a BDZ-level strike on Ord Corban, with and without fighting our way through a defending fleet; a drop assault on Ord Corban, objective personnel; a drop assault with bombardment support on Sector Group headquarters. Mirhak-Ghulej, wait outside, QAG111, wait here, the rest of you, dismissed.'

They left, in varying degrees of bafflement; Lennart faced round to the helmeted High Colonel.  
'Whatever it is, Captain Lennart?' The trooper's voice was ice cold.

'I can guess. In fact, I could put together a very convincing theory. You probably could too.' He had to be a veteran. 'I trust my officers' discretion and loyalty enough to at least tell them that there is a problem; they won't go looking for evidence, nor will you, nor will I.'

'So what do you need me for?' The senior stormtrooper asked.

'First of all - general point of procedure. The overwhelming majority of local Imperials involved in this are overwhelmingly likely to be dupes rather than traitors. When I do send you in, and I don't know where or when, shoot to stun and disable. Then identify the punishably guilty, and shoot them without interrogation.' Lennart ordered.

'You don't want to know. Acknowledged. Second?'

'Soothe my conscience. I do have a theory - if it's right, I want to be at least reasonably certain that the reason of state behind it was at least approximately just. Think of it as a helping hand to one less strong in faith than yourself.'

'I know considerably less than you do.' It was impossible to tell if the stormtrooper High Colonel was sincere, or if he was playing along, giving the Captain enough rope to hang himself.

'Some of your people know more - I need to talk to one of your hunter-killer teams, Omega-17-Blue. I believe they are fairly well informed about subjects like the Jedi, and the Force.'

Long silence. The High Colonel sat there like a statue; undoubtedly involved in internal comms. Lennart wished he could overhear. 'Agreed.'

Lennart sighed with relief. 'Tell them, whenever they're ready. Dismissed - and on your way, send Commander Mirhak-Ghulej in. It'll be a refreshing change of pace to deal with a nice, normal problem like two of my officers threatening to murder each other.'


	8. Chapter 8

Lennart sat in the ready room, brooding. He knew what was going on, and wasn't sure how he knew. The whole plan had just popped into his head, like a flashbulb memory. Something had been done - a secret he well understood why the Empire wanted to keep. So did he, but he couldn't keep it on his own.

The Exec's re-entering the room was a welcome distraction.

'Sit down, Commander.' Lennart hadn't quite yet reasoned out how to play this; aggressively, he decided.

'Chief Engineer Mirannon is a responsible officer. He understood what you were trying to do, and I'm sure he regretted slapping you down almost as much as you regret having it happen to you.'

'So you will support your officers - up to a point.' Mirkak-Ghulej said, bitterly.

'You owe him more than you know.' Lennart said, voice hardening. 'He saved you from me.' Two long steps, and Lennart was at the exec's chair, pulled it away from the table, grabbed him by the lapels, hauled him to the standing position.

Mirhak-Ghulej looked utterly shocked. He had, in fact, been less than respectful of the Captain; considering Lennart soft, un-Imperial, unprofessional even. He was on first name terms with some of his petty officers; how much more undignified could the man get? Being physically manhandled was less disturbing than realising the Captain had some durasteel in his backbone after all. Not literally, of course.

'The very least I would have done, and don't think it isn't still an option, would be to have you committed to psychiatric care. On the other hand, Gethrim's theory has some merit. What went through your head?' Lennart dumped him back in his seat.

'Somebody has to…' he mumbled. Lennart looked at his face, interested. Then he pulled himself together, and it was like a mask slipping back on.

'That was what they were doing, that was the charge that presented itself. How could I ignore that?'

Lennart instantly thought of half a dozen other heresies that would warp the exec's mind even further; but what would be the point? 'You intended the new-broom trick. Do something spectacular, get taken seriously. I did it myself, when I had your job - but there's spectacular and then there's more than you can cope with. What persuaded you that you could get away with putting half the fighter group on charges?'

'How was I supposed to ignore them? There they were, and the pilots are the worst. Always daring each other, always hazing. They disrupt a ship's routine, and tradition is not law.'

'No, but for maintaining order, it can be just as useful. The power went to your head, didn't it? Eight divisional officers, hundreds of section officers - and you jump to the head of the queue, at the same time as fortune hands you a problem you can't ignore. Life, indeed, has a lousy sense of timing.'

'They could have been released. It would have been necessary to impress discipline upon them, one or two would have served as examples for the rest.' Mirhak-Ghulej protested.

'Have you ever been an example?' Lennart asked him; Mirhak-Ghulej's face fell. He knew what was coming.

'No, Sir.'

'Would you like to be?'

'Captain, I was only trying to do my job-'

'Exec, your doing your job would have severely impaired the fighting efficiency of this ship. That is where the credit stops, that is the be-all and end-all; that is the point of the order and the discipline, of all the daily grind. Understand that and I might not have to have you transferred to a colonial tender hauling farm products along the outer rim.'

'Sir, the procedure-' Mirhak-Ghulej protested. He realised that the Captain held his career in the palm of his hand.

'You want procedure, I'll give you procedure. One; you are to familiarise yourself with the personnel profiles of every individual under your authority. Every. All forty-six thousand of the rank of Lieutenant-Commander or below. And I want a report and recommendation on each and every one.'

Mirhak-Ghulej was only near human; his data-processing speed was more or less standard. Assuming half an hour per file, worst case estimate, and every waking moment, that would be over fourteen hundred days' work.

'One point one; For as long as it takes you to do this,' and Lennart knew perfectly well how long, 'you will deputise your duties to the divisional officers, on a day by day rotating basis. And you'd better hope that I don't find anyone who can do the job better than you can. Or that I need to get to points two, three or four. Dismissed.'

Coldly, shock gradually changing to fury, Mirhak-Ghulej stood up to go, saluted - perfectly, marched out.

Sod, Lennart thought. What a time to make an enemy. Almost all the damage he can do to me - or for that matter, I can do to myself - is informational; I'll have him monitored. A wasted asset, too. The reason I wanted him in the job- I still need someone for that. Mirhak-Ghulej should find some shortcut round that; some elegant solution to the problem. Lennart could think of at least three, including the way he intended to process the recomendations. If he's daft enough to do it the hard way, he deserves it.

Unpleasant but straightforward. What was next on his list promised to be anything but.

Some of the crew were luckier than others. Ghorn III was a fairly nice planet, most of the time. When it wasn't suffering from massive solar storms, anyway.

Part of the ship's stormtrooper and engineering complements had been dropped to organise disaster relief, and do what they could to minimise the effects.

Watching AT-ATs break up storm cells by detonating flak blaster bolts was fun for a while - especially seeing how often they got it wrong, their guns were pared down to get as much firepower into as small a package as possible and were no good at the off-modes, but to gunners used to multi-teraton weaponry it got old fairly fast.

Nobody on the planet seemed to know or care to add up that no more men and equipment had gone surfaceside than one lift from the Black Prince's shuttles and transports could retrieve.

Port-4 turret team were on leave, heading for a warren of a pub, old stonework looking like a monastery with six floors too many all set at odd angles to each other, not far from a small aerospace-port in the north temperate zone somewhere. Not all of them were entirely happy with the décor.

'What billennium is this planet living in?' Fendon grumbled as they opened the main doors. Actual, real wood.

'Fourth oldest profession, brewing.' Suluur pointed out. 'Time honoured, it is.'

'That's what worries me - more they try to sell it, worse it's likely to be.' Aldrem said, sceptically. 'still, could be OK.'

'You recommended this place.' Suluur said.

'One of the lads from the Golan told me about it.' Aldrem said.

'If this is what they were on at the time, it must be good. Cross-eyed nerfs.' Assistant Gunlayer (CPO) Eddaru Gendrik, leader of sub-assembly team one, grumbled.

'There's more to life than gunnery and beer.' Aldrem said; the other fourteen turned round to stare at him, but he didn't care, he had just caught sight of the woman behind the bar.

All the gunnery team were more or less in uniform, but none of them were without the identifying shoulder patch; a human, in black armour that came from the same cultural era as the style of the pub, closed visor, usually a raised lance with black pennant, the ship's name and hull number, and the ship's motto - "In our hearts, wrath, in our hands the stars".

The gunners' badges had the knight carrying a turbolaser barrel instead of a lance.

They came in obviously as a group, and the locals turned to look at them. A mixture of shuttle pilots, airtaxi drivers, freight barge tenders, farmers and tourists, mostly human; the free traders would be potential trouble. Suluur scanned the place, with tactical potential in mind. Fairly solid furniture, primitive showpiece weapons and farm implements hung on the walls, half-floors and alcoves everywhere.

'What do you reckon? Fight then drink, or drink then fight?' He asked Aldrem.

'Yes,' he said offhanded, not paying attention, dreamily walking up to the bar.

The theme of the pub was pioneer days, there were half a dozen staff all dressed to fit; the one Aldrem had locked on to actually seemed to be the duty manager.

The bar was a spiral in the middle of the building, flat counter space at each alcove, and the duty manager was moving from one landing to another; she spotted the potential trouble coming, decided to deal with it herself, realised one of them was staring at her.

Aldrem spent most of his working life sitting down; he was a shade over middle height, fairly solidly built, handsome but strained, something zealot-like about his face, which had a strange light on it now, and eyes like - she had seen eyes like that before, on a bounty hunter; and his target. Drawing crosshairs on everything that passed across them.

She was dressed in a brass-ornamented low-cut leather bustier and matching bracers, rich, glossy dark tan colour complementing auburn hair, over a white silk shirt, black neck-cloth, floor-length white skirt; nearly the same height he was, reddish-brown eyes, oval face, she looked worried, lots on her mind. That only made her more beautiful to him. She was prepared for most things, from the usual rocket jockey chat up lines to assault (shock stick under the bar, two stun- set blaster pistols in the folds of her skirt); what she got was total dumbfoundedness. As their eyes locked, Aldrem's bravado completely deserted him.

He just stood there, looking moonstruck at her for five seconds before Krivin Hruthhal - subassembly 2 - saved the day.

He pointed at the taps. 'We'll have five of those, please, five of those, five of those…five of those, five of those and five of those.'

'The navy isn't overwhelmingly popular around here.' She warned them, apparently sincerely. 'Will you be staying long?'

Her staff were already pouring. Suluur waved a hand at them. 'Oh, this is just us deciding what we want to drink.'

'Come and sit with us.' Aldrem said to her, uncharacteristically softly.

'I'll stun her, you grab him and carry him to safety.' Suluur muttered to Hruthhal.

'No, stun him, and carry her to safety.'

She heard, showed no sign of being offended; 'Find yourselves a table.'

The gun team found a corner, with lots of interesting implements on the walls, and a clear line of retreat to the door; dragged three small tables together.

They clustered round, Aldrem glared at Fendon who planted himself next to the senior chief; he wanted a space left beside him. Fendon shuffled round.

The duty manager came over to the table herself, followed by two repulsorlift trays stacked with beers and ales. The gunners started sorting through them, Aldrem looked at her, puppyishly. She looked him over; senior noncom, could be worse. She sat beside him.

'Tell me about yourself?' Aldrem said, looking into her eyes from a range of two feet. Well within flash, or for that matter every, sort of hazard. 'How does someone born for wide open space come to be here?'

'My parents worked a tramp freighter.' She admitted.

'I knew there was something of the stars about you…' he introduced himself. 'Pellor Aldrem. My friends call me Pel.'

'Skipper calls him a trigger happy idiot.' Suluur added.

'Jhareylia Hathren. Trigger happy idiot?' she asked, amused.

'Complicated incident.' Aldrem admitted. 'We're gunners on the destroyer in orbit, Black Prince.'

'Oh.' She said. He was too busy looking at her to see her, see how she reacted to that. Not much showed; inwardly, she responded like any well trained Rebel field agent would. Scenting opportunity. Technically, she was a dispatcher; arranging passage for wanted fugitives in and out of the system. Her job gave her a lot of leeway for that. Now this - all right, fairly handsome - Imperial Starfleet gunner wandered into her life.  
'I hated the smallness of it, and the constant chasing in circles to make ends meet. As soon as I could, I found somewhere more solid, somewhere with roots.' She told him.

'All you really need is a bigger ship. On a destroyer, you roam the universe, you're not overshadowed, you can look any - almost - any star in the galaxy in the face and tell it where to go - a part, not a pebble.' Incoherent, but she knew what she meant.

As they talked, she listened with half an ear to the crosstalk between the gunners. Their captain had raked their exec over the coals? He was new to the job, and they missed the old one who had been a nasty piece of work but at least knew what he was doing.

The fighter wing had used wreckage to hold a barbecue on the flight deck? A junior engineer was in the sick bay with third- degree burns to the face after looking down a power conduit? The variable-gee toilets had backed up again? Domestic gossip interspersed with genuinely useful intelligence. They seemed...endearingly corruptible.

Endearing? Was she starting to take this man seriously? He was like an overgrown puppy; but if his and his crew's boasts were even half way right - they were - they were devastatingly good at what they did. She liked him. Was that so hard to say?

On his third drink, Aldrem went green. She draped his arm over her shoulders, supported him. He muttered an apology, had to close his mouth. She got him outside and to the gutter just in time.  
'Thanks.' He spluttered, after it was over. 'Not many prepared to go that far on the first date.'

She smiled at him. 'I'm used to looking after rummies. You didn't have enough for that, though. Is there something wrong?'

'Stress, hallucinations. Working too hard, training too hard, worrying too hard.'

'Some of the shuttles working out of this port are helping with the relief effort. Transporting refugees out, supporting work crews trying to set things to rights.' She said, reproachfully.

'That's…that's crazy. That's negligent. It was only flash, anything - system defence knew there was going to be trouble. They knew we were in low enough orbit there was a risk. Lowest-power planetary shields would have bounced that. If the rebels had taken the opportunity to wreck a few local industries you would have far worse on your hands.' He retched again; she knelt by him.

'Before you chew on me, ask - with half an hour's warning for a five minute job, why didn't the planetary defence do their part? Why didn't they protect you?' He actually sounded angry - on her behalf.

'Before I chewed you, I'd want to hose you down first.' She helped him back into the pub; he didn't need it, but accepted her touch anyway.

Maybe an hour of talk later, there was a descending rumble, hissing, clanks; the sound of a tramp freighter landing at the port. Aldrem glanced at it, then looked back.

'That freighter.' He said, looking at the battered YT-series. 'That's the one that got away.'

'Are you sure?' Gendrik asked his turret commander.

'I never forget a target.' He said, menacingly. 'Jhareylia - do you have an E-web?'

'I think this is still reacting with your stress medication.' She took the tumbler out of his hand.

'Something with a tripod. A bipod, at least?'

'Don't mind him, he's a gunner. Lost without a rangefinder to look through…you serious, Pel? Thinking of doing something about this ship?' Suluur soothed her and asked him.

'Suppose you do. Then an angry crowd of atmo jockeys comes pouring out after us and takes it back.' Krivin objected.

'I can fly one of those things.' Aldrem said. They just glared at him. 'Well, I can remote-fly a target drone. It can't be that much harder. It just looks bigger, that's all.'

'You're probably going to need my help.' She sighed. How else was she supposed to get on board one of those things? Besides which, she sort of found him cute.

Attacking the freighter was simplicity itself. The duty manager escorted a crowd of rowdy Imperial spacers out of the pub, across the concrete pad with the docking bays around it, apparently looking for a hire passage to take them back to their ship; past the freighter they recognised.

The crew came out to see what the problem was - and went down to a blizzard of stun bolts, which decorated the ship, the back wall of the bay, the ground, the sky, you name it.

Charge on board the freighter, light up the powerplant and engines, head for orbit- and get intercepted by one of Black Prince's assault transports.

They explained it, and it sounded insane. The sight of cold space brought it home to them, just how far off the norm they were. The ATR didn't believe them, so they said it again. It made even less sense, but this time it was accepted as crazy enough to be true.

'Shame.' The assault transport pilot told them. 'It'd go easier on you if you were rebels. Then you just get to die. Spin this one to the captain and he'll come up with something worse.'

'Why, SCPO Aldrem, is it always you?' All fifteen of them, sixteen counting the civilian, were on the carpet. Physically, they were in the ready room, in front of an irate Captain and a squad of stormtroopers. 'You have a gift for trouble that not even responsibility seems able to check.'

'We did capture a rebel transport, Sir.' Aldrem said woodenly.

'No, you captured an ex-rebel transport. They had disposed of it as too hot, yesterday. The crew you seized it from - most of them will recover - had only owned it for fifteen hours.'

'We didn't know that! Honestly, Sir, we thought we were doing the right thing.' Aldrem protested.

'You're gunners. You control one of eight main turrets, twelve percent of the ship's total firepower. You are not in that rank and that position in order to play Junior Stormtrooper. You are not allowed to throw yourself away that cheaply and that stupidly. The civil police have quite a charge sheet against you; grand theft starship, attempted murder, actual bodily harm, kidnapping-'

'I volunteered to help.' Jhareylia failed to interrupt Captain Lennart's flow.

'I could throw you to them and it would be only fair. All right, it was fairly dedicated. It was also mentally deficient. I'm not sure whether to promote you, demote you, transfer you or keelhaul you. If I do transfer you, it'll probably be to the Rebel Alliance.' Was it his imagination or did the civilian react to that?

'It was hot.' Lennart said, more calmly. 'The crew will be charged with receiving stolen property. What I will do with you - actually, I think that would suit you perfectly. Junior stormtroopers.'

'Oh, space, he's going to put us through basic again - Sir, can't you just demote us instead?' Aldrem pleaded.

'You insist in getting involved in a ground brawl, at least you ought to know how to come out of it in one piece. Stand watches as normal, but for the rest of the time, until they pass you as either fit or not likely to do it again, you belong to the Legion. Dismiss.'

All but two of the squad escorted them away; Jhareylia tried to sneak away with them, bu t- easy enough - he spotted her.

'As for you, congratulations, you've just volunteered for the Imperial Starfleet.'

She started to protest. 'No, it's not optional - if I let you go, the fleet would never live this down. Aldrem's not this loose normally; he would have thought about it, but not done it - unless he was trying to impress you.'

She flushed with embarrassment; remarkably well acted, Lennart thought.

'You were a shift manager at a pub, yes? Good. I'm going to make you the exec's steward. He could do with having a looser perspective around him. First one of you to drive the other mad wins.' To the other two stormtroopers; 'Take her away and have her sworn in.'

A knock on his office door; 'Enter.' He said, keeping his voice level.

Four stormtroopers, but the armour they were in was far from standard. Iridescent blue to red, shifting with the angle, smoother, sloped, overlapped and streamlined; how much rarer, more effective and more the badge of an elite, Lennart could only guess.

'Omega-17-Blue-Aleph, I presume?'

Aleph One nodded. 'More of us would be unnecessary.' Especially in full rig.

'I presume you know what the issue is.' Lennart said, sitting at the head of the table. It made no difference, being in a vulnerable position or not; if he stepped beyond bounds, and they thought they needed to, they could drop him easily.

'Enlighten us.' Aleph-3 said. She was looking at him through helmet sensors, in all the detail they could give.

'The major local rebel base used to be the fortress-factory system of the hundred and eighteenth republic fleet. You should know from your own High Colonel that the rebels are using the TS-Cosmic clearance of that business as cover to snipe at the Empire from.'

'Continue.' Aleph-2 said, trying to put him off balance.

'No, wait.' Aleph-3 said. 'The Captain is right, not to want to know more and say more than he has to.' Was she actually sympathetic? Lennart wondered. So did she.

'I've told the command team that it's something we don't need to know.' Lennart said. 'Something to work around. The problem is that I think I already know it.'

'How?' Aleph One barked.

'Putting the pieces together. You're all veterans of the Grand Army, yes?' Lennart was on very dangerous ground. 'You remember what the internal situation was like, mid-to-end phase, say three quarters of the way through the war.' Mentioning it brought a lot of memories flooding back for him. For them too? What was it like to have a mind filled with things you didn't dare or didn't know how to think about, embedded ideas and conditions? Would you realise that it wasn't normal? For that matter, did he?

'In what respect?' Aleph-3 asked him. There were other ways than the force to read someone's mind. She was watching his eyes, his worry lines, his body language. He didn't want them to tell him that he was right.

'The political war was in full swing. Natural born humans were flocking to the Republic's banner. By proportion, though, we weren't doing nearly as much of the fighting. Holding and clearing operations, patrol and defence- there were more prewar Republic admirals and captains dying of heartburn than Separatist attack.' He was exaggerating, but only in spirit; the numbers bore him out, that for their respective strengths the clones bore a vastly higher share of the war.

'There were mixed ships, mixed fleets; clone pilots, womb-born ground crew; clone gunners, womb-born maintenance and engineering teams, but only at the end of the war and in the early Imperial fleet. The hundred and eighteenth was an early experiment - one that went catastrophically wrong. Rumours ranged from plague through fratricide to outright defection. It bred mistrust and division in the fleet, it kept your kin exposed at the sharp end.'

'You expect us to object to that?' Aleph One said. Lennart was right; they knew where he was going.

'No, I don't. But wasn't it convenient, that the Jedi-commanded spearhead fleets were full of incorruptibly loyal clones, ready to stop them when they turned against the Republic?' Lennart asked.

'You believe-' Aleph One began.

'The Hundred and Eighteenth Fleet debacle was an act of political engineering, not of war. It prevented mixed fleets, forestalled mixed loyalties, made sure Palpatine was in a position to use you to wipe the Jedi out with a word when he chose.'

The stormtroopers conferred among themselves briefly, nodded. 'Take the next logical step.' Aleph-3 told him.

'It was a setup - because it needed to be set up. The vast majority of the Jedi had no intention of turning on the republic; it was the republic that turned on them.'

'Essentially correct.' Aleph-3 told him. The universe failed to move, and he felt disappointed in it.

'Would it be dumb of me to ask why?' Lennart said.

'No, it would be dangerous, but you've already accepted that. We are the worst people in the universe to ask - was it right, was it necessary. Let me ask you - how did you work it out?'

'What does it matter? Logic. Intuition. A leap of bad faith. All of the above.'

Subvocal, helmet com to helmet com; Do we inform him? Induct him?

Is there time?

'What effect,' Aleph One asked, 'do you think this knowledge would have?'

'On the Rebels - little to none, they believe something like it anyway. On the rest of the galaxy?' Lennart pondered it.

'Realising that they have been manipulated and lied to - even that they can be, on such a scale; realising that about one very large thing at least, the rebels are right; I think there would be many more worlds, under the circumstances, that would cross the line from thinking Empire something to be endured, to thinking it - us - something to be opposed.'

'We were never made,' Aleph-3 said, 'to be arbiters of destiny. We were never made to ask such questions.'  
She was evading, and with that, Lennart felt the balance of power shift.

'You know this answer at least. Why was it necessary? Why do you, veterans, Jedi hunters, do what you do - and it's not because you were bred to it. There's too much intelligence and too much creativity in it, you are fit to answer whether you want to be or not. Why was it necessary? Why is it?'

'Why do you care?' Aleph-3 tried to derail him; and nearly succeeded.

'About the truth, or about your opinion?' Lennart said. 'Surely the answer is obvious - you talk about being an arbiter of destiny. What do you think the captain of an Imperator has to be?' He shouted at them.

'Especially us, as much time as we spend on independent and detached duty - that is my responsibility.' He decided to push it. 'And you are mine, to ask questions of.'

No time, Aleph-3 com'd Aleph One.

Is there another way? Can you do this?

I think I can, she replied.

She stood up, took her helmet off, glared at him.

'Do you know who rose in the ranks of the Grand Army? The misfits. The malforms. The fractionally imperfect. The process threw the youngling out with the lavage; eliminate the ability to ask questions and you come dangerously close to eliminating the ability to learn from experience.  
Those of us who survived this long are the ones who learnt to question- and to hide the fact that they could. We did indeed come to our own conclusions; our own, perhaps, justifications.'

'You're accusing me, of asking you to tell me only what I want to hear.' Lennart said. 'Tell me what you want to tell me.'

'When I hear one of our victims talk for his life, I always wonder; they bring conscience up so often. What do they imagine it is, that it can be so different from the sense of duty we feel, like a waterfall in our heads? I am certain, certain beyond any doubt reasonable or unreasonable, that it was right.'

'I want to share your certainty. Convince me. Stand by what your conscience tells you.'

She took a deep breath - a lot rested on this - before beginning; 'The Jedi Order earned their extinction a thousand times over. Not for the damage they did, but for the damage they failed to prevent. The republic was set to drown in its own pus; how did it sink so low, with the Jedi watching over it?'

'You probably saw more of them in your youth than I did.' Lennart remembered. He was, like so many people who came to galactic attention, Corellian; it was a system with a lot that needed sorting out by some force of justice and order - and the Corellian Security Force were one of the things that needed sorting out.

'Exactly. Where were they, when you needed them?'

'They…nowhere.'

'Precisely.' Aleph-3 said, meaning it as a conclusion. 'Not for action, but for their inactions, in allowing the republic to sink so far that the Clone War was even possible. Any civilian court would convict them of malfeasance in office, and have them imprisoned; any military tribunal - you - would find them guilty of dereliction of duty and have them shot.'

'That, then, is exactly what you do.' He suggested; she replied with a nod.

'They had the power of the Force, they had the authority of the Republic; how did they fail so thoroughly to use it? Simply because they were trained to fail. Their withdrawn-ness, their detachment, their flat out refusal to relate to other's pain - I do not understand how someone can turn their back like that, and then dare to call another evil.' she had to pause for breath.

'They were like doctors who had sworn only to treat the symptoms of disease, and never the cause. I can't say I anticipated Order 66; you would have, if you had been there. But, Galactic Spirit, how I welcomed it.'

'Taken as children, divorced from ordinary life so totally as they were - you almost make it sound as if they need to be pitied.'

Lennart suggested, guessing at what Order 66 was; she was - not the words, the actions. Her flashing-bright eyes, above all else. Persuasive - contagious, even, in her certainty. Somewhere in his head, an alarm was sounding; reminding him that to Dordd, she had - claimed or admitted? - that she had been originally a public spokeswoman, sliver tongued and fluent with lies.

'I shouldn't be, personally, angry with them. We should thank them for being such fools as to call us into existence, to have failed so badly that it became our time, not theirs.' She said.

'Our? Clones, or-'

'Who protects the peace and security of the galaxy now?' She waved an iridescent arm, gesturing at the walls around her, meaning the ship as a whole. 'Rather more purposeful than a mere lightsabre, wouldn't you say?'

'Why not do justice upon them publicly, then? Simply because they were at their most useful, and most popular, precisely during the war?' Lennart theorised.

'That would be within your competence, not mine; I would accept your word as security for that.' She bowed to him.

'For someone who was not made to answer such questions, you handle them well. Still leaves me with one major problem, though; how do I prevent the echoes of that, righteous shoot or not - and many would say not - harming the innocent, or at any rate the loyal, now?' he asked them.

'It is not our place to say.'

'If you want a better job done, allow me to use some of the tools they failed to. One of those tools is surely realising that you don't know it all, and other people can provide valuable input to a problem. Hmmm?'

'Perhaps that was vague, I'll say it more clearly; we don't know. Unless - false crime?'

'You know more than you realise. Thank you.' Clearly, the interview was over. Try - no, the order he had already given, present as a reason for their condemnation - those responsible for something else.

Falsifying returns to regional command would probably do; something that would justify security, at least.

Whoever had come up with the incident, those twenty-three years ago, had probably thought exactly the same, Lennart realised. He wasn't sure whether to be comforted or depressed by that.

The troopers left, Aleph-3 putting her helmet back on.

He needs to know, she com'd. Someday.

He only listened to you because you batted your eyelids at him, Aleph One said contemptuously.

It worked, she said defensively. Besides, it's not forbidden. Not for what we want to turn him into.  
At a time when there is time. No sense presenting a half-trained man, Aleph One cautioned her.

She was more sure of him than the team leader was, and for a moment her hand rested on a pouch containing the present she had hoped to give him. A lightsabre; one with a crimson blade.


	9. Chapter 9

Enough of the wreckage had been retrieved that the ground crews were able to put two of the B-wings back together. There was a long waiting list for them; most of the bomb wing wanted a shot. Just to see what the other side was up to. 'Intelligence evaluation flights' was the usual description in the logbook.  
Most pilots admitted it was a joyride. In terms of priorities, the bomb wing - Delta, Epsilon, Iota, Kappa - got first crack, and senior ranks got priority within that.

Aron was third on the list, right behind Olleyri and the Bomb Wing Commander; he had invited his senior flight commander to take the second bird out with him.

Actually, going out with her was what he had been trying to avoid saying. He made a purely professional invitation, and she accepted in a purely professional spirit.

Tech Sargeant Oregal and his team were waiting on the pad with them. B-wings were not known for reliability, and he wasn't going to send two of his pilots out in craft he hadn't looked over himself.

'Don't know why you want to bother, Sirs.' He said, as the two captured fighters - splashed with imperial logos on every available flat surface - were tractored in to the bay.

'It's something different, Sergeant. After all, one can become spoiled by too much good flying.' Franjia said, putting on a mockingly exaggerated upper class Coruscanti accent. 'A change of pace from time to time reminds us of just how much we have.'

'Why didn't we borrow a couple of Alpha Lead while the Group Captain was looking the other way?' Aron said, looking without much hope at the two big, spindly bombers jockeying for space on the pad.

'Missing the speed?' Franjia asked him.

'Because the Group Captain would personally take the others out after you, ionise you, drag you back, beat the living shit out of you and have you painting ship for the rest of your life, Sir. Very protective of them, he is.' Oregal pointed out.

'Why couldn't you have made that much sense when we met?' Aron asked him, knowing perfectly well why not. 'And yes. Apart from the fact that I get shot at by bigger guns than ever before, the thing I really miss from the Interceptor is the ability to pick my fights. In a squint you can outrun or outmaneuver almost everything; in the Starwing you have to take what comes.'

'So it's just as well that we can, then.' Franjia bounced back.

The two B-wings were now down, and Olleyri and the wingco vaulted out of the cockpits- the old man showing he could still do it- and started to walk off, muttering to each other. They weren't paying much attention to their surroundings; Aron asked 'Good flight, Sir?' and got a 'Mmm.' in return.

Oregal was already walking round them, looking for pitting, loose connections, wear, checking engine temps and erosion, fuel levels, downloading from the onboard flight computer, the usual starfighter pre-flight.

'Well, Sirs, that's one thing you're not going to get out of a B-wing. Slow as glaciation. Nothing any more wrong with them than ever was, they're ready to go - and sirs; if anything goes wrong, just get out, don't bother trying to bring them back.'

'Cockpit systems?' Franjia asked.

'Good thought - they aren't designed to work with Imperial helmet displays. Turn the aids off and eyeball it, Sirs.'

Aron was actually relieved; he climbed into the nearest B-wing, sat down in the cockpit. Big, open active window display; flightstick and throttle; notes attached to most of the controls by the ground team that had put them back together.

Start it up - different engine note, higher pitched, closer to TIE scream than Starwing growl. Rebel fighters were designed to fly out under their own power rather than be racked and tractored; he started to work the repulsor controls, reacting off the ship's AG, and it pivoted - slowly. Franjia's was behind him, she was waiting for him to finish the maneuver; it moved like a sick bantha. He hoped it was just the repulsors. Out over the edge of the bay, the 'ground' dropping out from under him, roll, foils out, and throttle up.

Glance at the throttle, at the instruments; maybe he was doing something wrong. Apparently not. Glance back at the ship; by most standards, they were moving. By fighter pilot, second best is next to dead, standards - bricks. Hopeless.

Franjia was just behind him. 'Look, there's the Golan. We can outrun that, if we try really hard.'

'Not with the orbital speed it's making…do these things even do two thousand?'

She tried to put her B-wing through a barrel roll. It was more of a blubber wallow. 'Maybe we should write to the Rebellion, telling them how wonderful we think their new bomber is.' She suggested, sarcastic.

'Too much like baby seal clubbing for me.' Aron said, trying and slushing out of a yo-yo. 'Cheap kills are one thing, but this couldn't outfight mynocks - and I don't have their address.'

'Oh, dreck. Maybe you do - open up the com panel.' She said, suddenly serious.

'I left my spanner behind - hey. Rebel freqs, rebel crypto and com security active. What's that about?'

'Perhaps,' she said carefully, 'the Group Captain and the Bomb Wing Commander wanted to have a private conversation that no-one, well no-one we know,' apart from the inevitable Imperial Intelligence, 'could intercept.' She pinged out - checking if there was anyone else listening on the channel. No-one who they could detect, anyway.

Aron hauled the B-wing into a long swooping bank, one with a turn radius about three times that of his old Interceptor. The ship swam across his sights- red, enemy coloured box around it. No-one had bothered to reprogram the IFF. 'What do you think it was about, Flight Lieutenant?' he asked her, formally.

'What have we been doing in the exercise tanks? Let us have our fun, then sweat it out of us to bring us back up to readiness, skipper works that way, but I didn't think you would be too far gone to notice what we were up against.' She said.

'Antiship work, against unknown attackers, and in support of heavy ship to ship. We were beyond visual range and in heavy jamming, launching on sensor dots.' Which he had found annoying, but not suspicious.

'It helps, if you're a bomber pilot, to know something about the ships you may have to bomb, yes?' she said, trying not to sound superior. 'Sensor dots that moved, took punishment and fired back just like Imperator-I destroyers.'

'You mean we're in training to attack-'

'The local sector group? I think so. The question is, have they gone rogue or have we?' Franjia wondered, feeling her spine go cold.

'You know the Black Prince better than I do.' Aron said. 'I'm the new guy.' Turning parallel to the destroyer, then rolling away to avoid the Golan and Lancer beyond it. Slowly.

'Either option scares me. It wasn't just an exercise. Captain Lennart was taking it far too seriously.'

'Well, we lost.' Aron said. 'The last one, against two attackers, we got mauled.'

'Because the captain and the bridge team were commanding the attacking pair. The hull team, the command crew stationed below the bridge tower, were primary. Simulating the tower getting shot off.' Franjia told him - she had found out, quite simply, by asking the com-scan crews who set up the exercise environment.

'Should I be glad, or scared silly, that I'm on a ship where they prepare for that?' Aron asked.

'Depends which side you think we're going to be on.' She replied.

'Speaking of getting shot-' he said.

She tried to answer her own question. 'Ezirrn Tellick and I were more than just friends, and Ezirrn's mother threw herself at him. I know him better than most.' meaning Captain Lennart, 'You name the breach of protocol and uniform regs, he's probably guilty of it, but he's loyal.' She hoped.

'Which means the sector group aren't.' Aron said, slowly. He decided to leave the confession that she had been sleeping with her previous CO well aside. 'Why do I suddenly feel better about being in a Rebel fighter?'

'A piece of dreck like this?' she laughed, needing some excuse to and glad to move off topic. 'They're available in the sim tanks; they're pathetic. I wanted to see how accurate the simulators were. Nice guns, but the only possible use would be to saw off the thrusters, glue the entire thing to the Fulgur, and call it a point defence turret.'

'Would you describe me as paranoid?' Aron asked.

'What, just because you check your chair for land mines? No more than average.' She replied. It had been a water balloon, anyway.

'If we are about to pick a fight with, say, Imperial defectors in place, these things would be great for covert assassination.' Aron suggested. The attack force would even be self- eliminating.

'Good point. Let's go home and land, quickly, before we start to look competent with them.'

In terms of rank and seniority, the general rule ran; invariably a Captain, usually a Captain of the Line, for a cruiser or larger. Usually a Captain for a destroyer. Frigates were usually a Commander's ship, and corvettes a Lieutenant-Commander's. It might vary to a grade above or below, independent destroyer a Captain of the Line - a rank Lennart had been avoiding for years - small ship like a Victory maybe a Commander.

Companies gave their ships names that made no sense - like the Rendili Dreadnaught heavy cruiser, named after two classes neither of which it was. In practical terms, a medium frigate, between ships like the Acclamator above and Interdictor below.

The one sure way to tell which class a ship 'properly' belonged to was to see which rank held which job, and the disparity in size meant that the same job was done by different ranks on different ships, the main difference being in the numbers, not the nature.

The wave of envy coming off the eight hundred plus officers of equal or greater rank on an Imperator when something like a CR90 Corvette sailed by, and the sheer volumes of hatred directed at it's commanding Senior Lieutenant, probably counted as a disturbance in the force.

Commander Ielamathrum Brenn had more seniority than most of the local officials, but a sufficiently median job not to attract too much attention; accordingly, he hopped a Skipray out to local base, Ghorn IV.

Black Prince was over the relatively pastoral Ghorn III to avoid getting in the way of the traffic around the main port; that was the system's main inhabitable, but two of the moons of Ghorn IV had been terraformed and that was where the main naval and military presence was. What mining and manufacture there was existed around the other small gas giant, V.

A couple of empty orbits and a lot of empty kilometres between them; he could have micro-jumped it easily, but that would have made him look too competent. So run the thrust up, cruise it at high sublight, and take the time to think.

The absolute record for the Kessel Run still stood at twelve parsecs, by a light freighter pilot who had a price of two hundred thousand creds on his head now - for reasons other than criminal incompetence. The man had to be either a genius or an idiot, or both. To choose, and use, a near direct line through the maze - basically playing pinball with your ship, in the fierce and variable environment of a stellar morgue - it was more of a negative test, a proof of lack of judgment.

Using a ship with as much power to frontage as that could almost count as cheating; there was also envy involved. Brenn had conned a Venator through the Kessel run, in hot pursuit of a rebel probe-ship, in fifteen point one. Then again, he had also been chasing their own flotilla leader, whose nav had taken an Allegiance class heavy through in fourteen point six. That man was fleet navigation coordinator on the Executor now, which made Brenn almost thankful he hadn't done any better.

The Rebel had hit a plasma jet and never come out, so it was certainly possible to do worse.

He had nothing like as much confidence in his abilities to chart a political course, but the only alternatives were the Captain, or Gethrim Mirannon, so him it was. His mission was to discuss options, in theory - confer with the sector group's staff on how to use the intel data that had been recovered from the Fulgur and its prisoners.

It was sensible, and utterly meaningless. His actual objective was very different; find out how far down the rot goes. Find out how badly they think they're doing. Find out if there's anyone we can trust. No point accelerating to a speed that would stress the Skipray's shielding too badly. Boost up to a third lightspeed, drift, decelerate. Hour and a half. Almost enough time to think of something.

Oh, yes; don't get caught. By rebel, or imperial, intelligence. Optimist.

Ghorn IV-a, Quorpall, looked like it had a giant antenna sticking out of it; it had been supposed to have a beanstalk, for some reason known only to the Republic Terraforming Agency. Somebody sensible on the staff had realised, half way through the project, that there was nothing whatsoever on the planet worth shunting up and down the gravity well on that scale. It was just another late-republic boondoggle, another interest group getting its share of the public purse. They had finished the shaft, anchored it properly, but there were no elevators, no transfer station, just another monument to the good engineering and bad politics of the late Republic.

There was a small defence complex on the counterweight asteroid, but most facilities were groundside. The only unit of any real weight in orbit was a Meridian-class frigate.

First, there had been the old Ecliptics, decent heavy- multirole ships, space, air, land; the Acclamators had been an evolution from them. The troop and fighter stripped, space combat version of that was the Meridian, the third generation of a distinguished family. Hefty pieces of work; a well handled Meridian could take a badly handled Victory. Against an Imperator - it might last long enough to be interesting. Her captain could be an important man to talk to. That would follow.

Re-enter and put the skipray down on the shuttle pad next to subsector HQ, virtually in the shadow of the beanstalk. Simple; in his capacity as crack navigator, he could make things easy for himself, which in his capacity as very mediocre pilot, he needed.

Quorpall had the slightly tingly, too bright feeling of a world whose ecology didn't really belong there. Land, shut down, get out.

He was met by an orderly, a young junior lieutenant who led him over to a repulsorjeep. Through the complex, up to the low dome command centre.

Inside, it was almost arrogantly structurally unsound; heavy galleries of office and admin space suspended from the ceiling, repulsor-braced platforms, cool, serene and very neat. He was shown to the conference room, floating in air; it bobbed slightly as he got in.

Eight people there, two Commanders - one with the rank cylinder of a command officer, one seemingly logistics. Two Lieutenant-Commanders, both staff, one sensor and one planning directorate. Four Lieutenants, at least one of whom would be security. Four stormtroopers.

He plugged his comp into the room's displays; once the introductions were over, he began. 'We were lucky. Up to the last moments of the chase, the rebel frigate believed it had a chance of escape, so they delayed purge procedures until it was too late. We recovered a good deal of data.'

Three of them winced slightly; one of each rank. Dreck, Brenn thought, I'm outnumbered.

'We have locations for fleet rendezvous- pointless except for what they tell us about procedure; much closer to traveled space than normal. Very arrogant of them.'

He watched how they reacted; the Meridian's captain looked embarrassed, at least, but the worried looking lieutenant, probably an ISB plant, was not impressed at all.

'We have locations of several more base stations,' Brenn continued, 'most of which will be evacuated by now, but there's a chance, if we move fast enough-'

The logistics Commander objected. 'A chance of further Rebel ambushes?'

'We can't do it all on our own.' Brenn said, coming on too harsh.

He brought up the sector map. Not time to take the big risk yet, leave Ord Corban strictly alone.

'We chose this sector to repair and refit after our clash with the Rebel cruiser Mon Evarra because it was the quietest within reach. Either we were wrong, or the rebels have moved back in, in force. In that case, it's imperative we kick them back out again before they become too deeply embedded.'

The security lieutenant relaxed a little.

'The rebel coding system is penetrable, but their shorthand less so. What is a Neiman-class base facility, for instance? The most interesting aspect is the glimpses this ship offers of something approaching an actual Rebel fleet structure.'

'They have a structure.' The planning lieutenant-commander said. 'Mostly based on the old republic navy.'

'Their equipment certainly seems to be.' Brenn dropped in.

'What do you mean by that?' one of the lieutenants said.

'The local force - local, mark you - flagship seems to be a Venator class destroyer. Very heavy metal, for terrorists.'

'We have no such data.' The sensor officer stated.

'Acquire some, unless you want us to beat you to the mark.' Brenn said. 'I presume the sector group is interested in that big a trophy? We have our hunting license.'

'Your ship isn't fit for combat.' The logistic commander stated. 'You can't wander around our sector at random looking for trouble.'

'If we did, how much would we find? Your official estimate of rebel presence in the sector has one Dreadnaught frigate,' calling up the map, adding the suspected base stations, 'which seems to be lurking in the barren stars around here.'

He highlighted a patch of space that included Ord Corban. The planning officer and the security lieutenant's eyes flickered in that direction. Ah.

'It doesn't include any of the formations - hunter groups, striker groups, warden groups, support groups - that turn up in the Fulgur's computer systems. Something needs to be done.'

The discussion dissolved in detail after that, the logistics officer and planner getting increasingly anti - no real proof, could have been disinformation, need to retain forces to cope with other threats, serviceability issues, alien presence in the sector. Brenn knew better than to get annoyed with them; he let the locals do that for him. The local force was understrength; it was a small sector, so it got a small sector group - less than half nominal.

It sounded as if the rebels were being relatively careful not to give the game away; rumours, rumblings, a long string of minor and distant losses, relatively little done against the Imperial starfleet itself. One of his worst habits, more or less an occupational disease, was playing with maps. Tied in to the base computers, he started plugging search routes, standard patrol patterns, effective sensor reach of bases into the map. The sensor-systems officer was looking at the map too.

'Gaps in the system?'

'I see a lot of relatively intense sweeps of near space, a lot of ships held as reaction force.' Brenn said. 'What are they being held back for?' He wanted to see what sort of answer he would get. 'Officially, the sector's quiet. The theory is that the only rebel activity we're likely to see is some form of last desperate objective strike, so we're basically on defence and showing the flag.'

An argument broke out at the table. A fair and frank exchange of views, the minutes would call it. The planning officer was yelling at the ship captain, who was yelling back.

'You always select the same handful for the plum jobs, and they always come back empty. Rotation is doctrine, and it's our turn.'

'You will get the job you're given.' The planner shouted at the Meridian's skipper.

Brenn moved to intervene, but the lieutenant buttonholed him. 'Commander, we need to talk.'

The stormtroopers followed him out; the lieutenant led him up to the peak of the dome, to a suspended pod with a holonet unit. It activated, and a being Brenn did not recognise, not in uniform, appeared.

Falleen, slightly flabby around the eyesockets, rich, suave. That was strange in itself; they were superb manipulators, but generally not staunch supporters of the Empire. Having a dent put in your planet did that. So who was being held hostage for this one's good behaviour, or was he just a traitor to his own people? As for the being, personally - unctuous, Brenn would have said at first. Once he began speaking, the navigator would have preferred 'pompous prat.'

'This is the man, Sir.' The lieutenant addressed the image.

'I am Moff Xeale. You have blundered into my sector, and into my plans.'

Hello to you too, Brenn thought, trying not to look disgusted.

'Sir, we're theatre reserve. So far, we've encountered three times as many rebel medium warships as your people even think exist, so there's a good case to be made for the theatre reserve becoming involved.'

'Seven levels of rank below me, and you dare to suggest anything at all? Lieutenant, you,' pointing at the security man, 'leave the room.' The lieutenant smiled viciously, at Brenn, patted his holstered blaster, left.

Calm, Brenn thought. Don't give anything away. Don't get into trouble.

'I am not impressed by your patchwork, vagrant ship. How does that reflect on the might of the empire?' the Moff said, sarcasm dripping off his voice. 'How will my systems react to that mockery of Imperial glory?' So that was how he was going to defend it. Politics first.

'We're a working ship. We are behind in our cosmetic repairs, Sir - other systems came first.'

'No wonder you are a reserve vessel; no reputable sector would have you. You will do no work here.'

'Sir, with all due respect-' the Falleen changed colour slightly, becoming angrier red - 'you aren't directly in our chain of command. We operate logistically to directorate III, Sindavathar region command, administratively to Hundred and Forty-Ninth Fleet, operationally to Destroyer Squadron 851.' Half a galaxy away, no longer existent, and provisional respectively.

'Are you refusing an order?' the Falleen's eyes glowed.

'Of course not, Sir; but as is established protocol, we will inform our own chain of command. A bare order to allow the rebels to go unintercepted-'

'Is an order, and must be obeyed as such.' The Moff leaned back in his chair, gave every appearance of thinking about it.

'There are…plans, you see. We allow them to believe they have a safe haven, until - they are visible, and the moment is ripe. Then, and only then, we will sweep them from the heavens.' Said with clenched fist. For a moment, it was so typically megalomaniacal, Brenn actually believed it.

Brenn's being away left the captain with only one person to really talk to; the chief engineer.

'This had better be good, I'm supposed to be delivering a lecture on advanced damage control. What is it?' Mirannon asked, mainly for form's sake.

'Political damage control. I've just gone and planted a suspected rebel spy on the exec.' Lennart admitted.

'Well, if you want them to get a false idea of what's going on, you couldn't do better. What has this got to do with me?'

'Traditionally,' Lennart said, smiling, 'it's supposed to be a five year old child. I figure that for pure unadulterated logic, an engineer is the next best thing.'

'Something,' Mirannon bounced back at him, 'I assume you weren't guilty of at the time.'

'Oh, when an incident that absurd presents itself - I tried writing it up to report to regional command, but it looked so kriffing ridiculous on paper.'

Mirannon pulled a datapad out of his pocket, started sketching.

'Hmm?' Lennart made a questioning noise.

'Setting the problem up as a venn diagram. Whose areas of knowledge and social connection overlap.' Some of it macro'd in, most of it was rapidly scribbled. Mirannon kept up a running commentary. '-two orders away from Sn(2), inadvertence, pr.5 of deliberate infochanting with Sn(4) via op F-sub-E2-'

'You're doing this deliberately, aren't you?' Lennart asked.

'Yes, and you're right. It does look ridiculous on paper.'

Mirannon plugged the datapad into the desk's holoprojector, displayed the nested bubbles in all their bafflement. 'Much better. Now you can draw conclusions that don't depend on instinct.'

'Assuming I can make sense of it at all.' Lennart grumbled good- naturedly.

'You did interrupt me on the way to give a lecture. You know how one of these is supposed to work.'

'Ah, I think I see. The exec, for instance, is in three fields - no, five.'

'I did have to simplify a lot. And yes, fields within fields. He knows most of what there is to know of basic-knowledge-of-the-Empire, but a lot less of basic-knowledge-about-the-Alliance.

Long, narrow ellipse? He has a social overlap now with someone who - depth of colour is degree of certainty - has access to a subset of secret-knowledge-of-the-Alliance, and-'

'Assuming this has any relationship to reality at all.' Lennart said, sceptically.

'Abstracted but relevant, trust me - threatened versus exploitable knowledge space, and - I was right first time. It was a dumb move.'

'Assuming active manipulation by the participants?'

'Plug in the factors for that, and - still dumb. No matter how finely balanced it comes out, assuming she has tendencies to talk that the exec simply doesn't, it's a risk that didn't need to be taken.' Mirannon said it like a certainty.

'You needed a diagram to work that out? Assume that I had a reason, not yet obvious from this. What would it be?'

'Disinformation flow. Do you need help coming up with any useful lies?'

'It would come in handy.' Lennart admitted. 'The basic plan was to make them think we're not trusted. That whatever we realise, and whatever we attempt, is going to be marginalized by sector group and dismissed entirely or not supported.'

'First make sure that it actually is a lie.' Mirannon said.

'Brenn's on that at the moment. The other reason is that, socially, I think it'll be good for him.'

'Something has malfunctioned in your head.' Mirannon said, flatly.

'What do you suggest I do with him, then? We need him, so how do I bring him, metaphorically, on board? Left to myself, I would run too loose a ship. It could cripple his career, to promote him one day and break him the next. At the time, I thought he deserved it.' Lennart said.

'Throwing him a rebel to play mind games with could do more than just cripple his career. You do realise that you've gone from worrying about his prospects to, I think the vidshow phrase is 'used as an unwitting pawn', in one breath?'

'I know. Getting the crappy end of the stick- I want him to have more sense of how that feels. Yes, I know, I'm probably going to make him worse, and no, I'm not going to let him take it out on the crew.' Lennart decided.

'Trying to teach humility to a desk officer - twenty thousand years of history are against you.' Mirannon pointed out.

'Maybe so. Have you been talking to the ground complement lately?'

'They have been helpful.' Mirannon said. 'I know they're incorruptible, but it would be useful if they were, fractionally, so we could actually do something for them to say thank you.'

They were not technically adept, most of them, but they were diligent, sharp-eyed, and unwavering. Once you told them what the right thing to do was, they got on with it.

'I had to interview some of the veterans and specialists, about the old days, the republic and the Force.'

'Hmph.' The engineer snorted. 'Whatever advantages there may be to it, I already have the strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitic forces to occupy my time. I don't need psionics on top.'

'I'd be more certain of that myself, if it wasn't the fashionable view.' Lennart said.

'That's what twenty years of indoctrination does for you.'

'Gethrim, you had better hope you never get transferred away from this ship, because describing official policy in terms of open indoctrination - you could be shot for that.' Lennart said, half amused, half worried.

'Some physics models apply very closely to politics. Ideological influence, to put it politely - I'd call it propaganda - expands to fill the available space. You think the people responsible for it don't think technically about it?' The chief engineer said.

'Maybe they do, but that wasn't what I was interested in. The Force. Facts.'

'Takes us straight back to propaganda, and what the Jedi wanted us to think about the Force. They colonised the mind-space around it; raise and maintain their authority, thought control over their own- and at some point, they went from knowing how much spin they were using to actually believing their own take on it.' Mirannon stated.

'This is part of your operational responsibilities how, exactly?' Lennart asked him.

'We're in a physical, not a social vacuum. Believe it or not, we have to worry about people, even if not designing for them we have to design around them. Or, if you want it that way, idiot proofing.'

Lennart shook his head. 'One of these days…so they lied to their own students, who grew up believing the lie and passing it on as truth. That much makes sense. I wonder to what extent we do the same?'

'More than we want to acknowledge. Anyway, simple logic; if the Force flows from every living thing, then every living thing has the Force. Irrelevant to minor in most, if there ever was data to make good estimates on, it's not accessible now.

Major powers - there has to be more potential out there than they ever succeeded in tapping. Minor abilities, that could be mistaken for high fitness, good judgement or dumb luck; probably trillions use the Force without being consciously aware of it.'

'I was afraid of that.' Lennart admitted.


	10. Chapter 10

'Today's topic: how to abuse a tensor field.' The chief began.

That raised a few eyebrows. The audience were a mixture of junior officers who needed to know, senior officers in for a refresher and members of other departments who wanted to know what Engineering was up to.

A hand went up; gunnery, port battery commander.  
'Abuse, commander?'

'Nine tenths of the technology we use- 91.2% to be exact-' only the engineers realised it was a joke- 'is described by the function it performs, or by the manufacturer's advertising department.  
Don't get me started on the subject of durasteel; and we have 'power converters', that in the forces they convert, from and to, are entirely separate technologies from each other. It's as loose and woolly a term as "flying machine".'

The 'lecture hall' was actually one of the bays of Main Machinery, subsection 2; sub-1 was the MCR, the master control centre for the ship's engineering functions, sub-2 was central repair and reconstruction. Most of the audience was sitting or leaning against disabled component parts; the chief engineer's lectern was an auxiliary power unit from one of the main turrets, and there were about eight hundred manufacturing droids stored on the gantry behind him.

'The specifications come from the same sources. Abuse is a loose term; properly, use to it's limits.' Holodisplay; Force field architecture of an Imperator- class destroyer.  
Secondary display; force field architecture of a Venator- class destroyer.  
'Basic observation, people. What changed from one generation to the next?'

'Modularity?' one of the main drive technical officers- Lieutenant Marnart- asked.

'Correct. A good decision, made for the wrong reasons.' The displays showed coloured dots, red tensor, blue stasis, green relative inertial, turquoise hyperdrive, orange atmospheric, yellow particle and violet ray shielding generators, haze around them showing areas of effect.  
'The Venator is wartime construction. Of the ship rather than combat functions, one of each plus secondary/backup. To improve, it is necessary, and I mean it this time, to abuse it or replace it, frequently necessary after abusing it in any event.'

'Why wasn't she designed to the limits of the technology to begin with?' damage control Lieutenant Sprenger.

'Cost, safety and diminishing returns. Cost; two hyperdrive cores are more expensive than one plus the support machinery to expand the hyperfield to the same area.  
Safety; our multiples have to be integrated with each other. This places a burden on the skills and computing resources of the ship that is non-trivial.  
Diminishing returns; take a hypothetical. With a 100kps2 relative inertial field, this ship becomes a danger to her crew. Power hungry, inefficient, causes unnecessary strain, and you now stand a good chance of being slammed to your death against the fore rather than aft bulkheads.'

Slight ripple of laughter at that. The chief engineer carried on. 'The Imperator is post war construction. This changes the design objectives. The Venator is more efficient in the short term, but their service life is two centuries at best, and the single large generator format makes them expensive and difficult to refit.

The Imperator class- one of whose design objectives was to deal with the refuse left over by the clone wars- is more efficient in the long term. The redundant multiple medium generator format makes us more damage tolerant- with proper system management- easier to repair by replacing damaged elements of the network, easier to upgrade if the investment becomes materially or politically possible. Also, the convolutions of baffling and mirroring necessary to get an even field intensity out of generators which obey the inverse square law become more manageable.'

'If I ever allow any of you to slack off long enough to read it,' Mirannon said, looking at the engineering personnel, 'I have a file of the considered-and-rejected design proposals for the Imperator that rewards study. Particularly as, given KDY's other commitments and the politically driven haste the Imperator design was finalised with, the yards license- building them filled in the blanks largely to their own ideas. Frequently with elements rejected for the official design.

Sienar- built ships, recognisable by their more centralised hyperdrive arrangements, have the worst maintenance and serviceability records in the fleet; carelessness caused by corporate envy.  
Even KDY/Fondor versions are different from KDY/Kuat- more heavily armoured and fractionally slower, sub-control centres separately armoured, fire control and sensors more sensitive but less jam resistant, their most serious flaw is an old school ring-main power system.'

'This ship?' one of Brenn's plotters asked.

'Correllian built, which is good. Not luck- determinism, we wouldn't have survived this long unless she had been. The 695 to 782 batch were assembled to very stringent specifications because Correllian Engineering were aiming for a larger share of the construction tenders. They actually tried to win a contract by producing a superior product, instead of resorting to bribery and corruption as usual. Show of hands- who thinks it worked?'

Roughly a third of the personnel present.

'I wish. They do a lot of refit business, though. KDY/Kuat's build quality started high but declined with growing complacency, Fondor's began as mediocre and improved, Loronar's are distinctively more fragile, lighter and faster, and Rendili stuck their own bridge tower design on the 11280 to 11431 batch as well as replacing between ten to thirty of the LTL's with medium turbolaser clusters and missile tubes. Those are the ones that made it into production.'

'Sir, I know we're supposed to be here to learn about structural reinforcement fields, but could you tell us more about the rejected elements of the design?' Sprenger asked.

'You're going to go away knowing what I want you to know. The only variable is how much time you sidetrack me into wasting on other matters first… The most interesting is a massively parallel multiple micro generator design. That would have broken the ship up into fifteen thousand separate zones, each with it's own fighter class or better hyper, stasis, tensor and relative inertial nodes.

It failed primarily because of the massive overload it would have placed on the human component. Also because the individual nodes, as a consequence of their size, had limited capability.  
There were two further developments; one which ventured into utter lunacy, by encapsulating each zone. The ship would have resembled fifteen thousand light freighters glued together. Combined and separate combat modes for a ship like that would have been interesting verging on bizarre.  
Not everything possible is good to do- there are very good reasons that one stayed on the drawing board.'

'Massive overload on the human component? Sir, is that a euphemism for "splat"?' one of the fighter wing ground crew, a tech sergeant.

'No, it means that by the time you'd finished learning how to look after them properly you would have been eight years dead.  
Actually, frequently it is a euphemism for splat. The splinter version would have had a malfunction and accident rate well beyond any sustainable or acceptable limit. Believe it or not, the engineering department does respect human limitations. Occasionally. Most of the time, we just bitch about them.'

He drank from his glass of water- there had been a spate of practical jokes a couple of months back; something in the water, and half the ship had been peeing emerald green. The joker responsible had never been caught; the chief suspects were the medics. And himself.

He went on; 'Maintenance and upgradeability is my hobby-bantha, not the topic at hand, and I will ramble on it at the end of the lecture, not the beginning. Tensor fields; what are they?' He looked for a non- engineer to get an answer from.

'They, ah, reduce tension on the ship's hull by exporting part of her mass into subspace…?' one of the galley staff asked.

'Droids, lynch that man.' Mirannon turned to them; they were inhibited from anything of the sort, but most of them had acquired enough personality to act it. They activated, turned glowing eyes on him, started to clank forward-

'I'm sorry I didn't mean it-' he gabbled.  
Mirannon turned to the droids. 'Stand down.'

'Although,' he continued to the cook, 'you probably do deserve it. No. And relative inertial fields don't rely on subspace, either, something else described by function rather than mechanics.  
N+5th generation relative inertials are multiple supporting mechanism; entanglement momentum transfer, field couplings from drive to hull frame, a mesh of compartment- localised gravitic nodes, and how many lectures do you expect me to give at once? Tensors.'

Another holodiagram. 'If you go far enough back, you find stress fields- the ancestors of our tensor field, and another backwards description. The tensor field counteracts stresses in the members of the ship.  
Stress fields did this literally, creating opposing and cancelling pressures- converting to more easily withstood forms- which did relatively little for the service lives of the ships they were fitted to.  
A tensor field generates a binding and stabilising force within the hull material on the order of the binding energy of an atomic nucleus; this is very easy for it, because that's exactly what it is.'

'So how do we abuse it?' the propulsion engineer, Marnart, asked.

'A strong nuclear force field deploys, and anyone who is surprised by this will have their brain remedially overclocked, nuclear levels of energy. If we lose power trunking, the tensor field can be tapped from the nearest local generator as a capacitor bank and input to the local grid.  
This is less efficient than doing it properly, but provides a valuable interim measure until we can rig proper DC cable. This has further synergistic benefits; it means we need fewer APUs, which gives us a better mass distribution, improving agility, therefore evasion, reducing the need for them.

Secondly, it can be used to fill in jobs that no structural member could do. Members which may or are required to deform- Durasteel doesn't flex well. In context. There are as many different compositions of durasteel as there are of steel- a detail we will go into later.  
Most of the elasticity of the hull comes from the tensor field. The hull frame attachments points are minimal material, mostly field.  
The tensor field also serves as the retaining wall for most of the rest of the force fields. It would be possible to project a tensor field without a material carrier, and have it perform most of the functions of a ship- and if any of you are crazy enough to volunteer to test the idea, then you're too stupid to live anyway and I might let you.'

'No, thank you, sir- but why do we have a two meter thick armoured hull, if the force field is tougher than the hull anyway? Why all that material, why not simple plating?' Sprenger, again, asked.

'Short version- we need a framework to bolt the other force field generators to. If properly designed, the fields are mutually supportive. The relative inertials reduce stress on the hull which reduces the load on the tensors, lowering power requirement out of or increasing margin of safety in combat.  
There are some interesting things you can do with a stasis field, thermal conductivity and incoming turbolaser fire, too.'

'So if the hull's just a metrology aid-'

'The stresses imposed on it by the force field architecture are substantial; orders of magnitude better than bare metal, but still demanding. The hull is also our fail safe.  
It has to possess sufficient strength to function without the force fields. If properly put together- and dockyard workmanship plays at least as large a part in this as basic design- should be able to support and withstand a failing force field complex long enough for us to remedy or execute controlled shutdown.

Lastly it must be a material or composite of materials that can benefit from tensor and relative inertial fields. Iron, at the lowest point of the binding energy curve, is too stable for this.  
Depleted-electron-shell materials are advantageous, nuclei closer together and we turn a disadvantage into an advantage by using the opportunity to apply active electromagnetic binding and stabilisation also.  
Neutronium would be perfect, if we had drives of literally infinite power. Stealth is nearly irrelevant, because when we are emitting stellar power levels from the ion drive, we're approximately as visible as if we did.

Until that happy day, we will employ as much as we have the mass budget for. Those of you who have no head for numbers may wish to leave now. Now consider a material structure of composition…'

Two supposedly secret transmissions. One of which crossed the signal intercept team's desk, the other did not.

Embedded in a message, supposedly to her sister;

Vineland sector, oversight group eleven.  
Hathren, J. System cell Ghorn, network Lobat-4, reporting.

Situation complicated. I have been conscripted into the Imperial Navy as the result of an incident- refer to the news. I am on board the ship currently at the top of our watch list, and in a position of some access.

Frankly, it's far too good to be true. I hope this harmonic coding is as secure as it's supposed to be.  
I have been employed- they haven't even tried particularly hard to indoctrinate me yet, and yes, I know how dubious that sounds, it's far from the only worrying thing about this situation- as a personal servant, they call them stewards, to look after an officer in disgrace.

It's possible that they want me to do them a favour by abducting him. From what I have been able to see of life on board this ship, something as basically abnormal as that seems to be a daily occurrence.

When I said I wanted to do something different, this wasn't what I had in mind. To achieve as much as we know they have, the crew of this ship must be sharper than they seem. Common sense eaten up completely by their jobs? It would fit.

This ship is in much better condition on the inside than the outside. I have some access to the ship's personnel files- one of the people I was involved with is possibly the top ranking gunner in the sector, never mind the ship, and he could pass for fifteen. Away from the trigger.

I can't funnel bulk data through a covert channel like this; I'll have to cherrypick. The ship is theatre reserve, not local; she has wider access. It seems odd to call a ship named 'Black Prince' she, but they refer to her that way.

Anyway, it will take time for me to get into a position to extract and exfiltrate. I'll trickle what I can, and should have valuable data when- let's not tempt fate; if- I do.

Defection prospects? Unlikely. With so much blood on their hands, they would be unwelcome in the Alliance, and besides, they would probably make us look bad.

Candidate/Watcher 22173, reporting.

Interim observation, candidate Lennart, J.A.

Status; unpromising. Candidate has genuine talent, intuitive/precognitive, sense related, but is under only moderate pressure to develop it. Candidate is a man of significant status and other talents, but little outward ambition.

Recommendation; push rather than pull. To force development of his abilities, a threat to what he already has is indicated. Perhaps this ship would make a fitting flagship for one of your protégées.

Secondary subject, Mirannon, G.K.Q.

Status; contraindicated. Subject has displayed a number of task- related abilities apparently without broader grounding, but is only subliminally aware of them if at all. Subject is also openly contemptuous of such talents.

Recommendation; playing on this one's pride and ambition could work, but given his attitude and approach, it would be difficult to make use of him.

Security warning; prime prospect intuited his way to a nearly complete understanding of the Ord Corban operation. Subject is loyal, but from pragmatic reasons. Rebel exploitation of this cannot be delayed much longer- see candidate recommendation.

One lecture, two messages, three captains.

In Lennart's day cabin, Commander Aythellar Barth-Elstrand, whose Meridian was orbiting nearby, and Senior Lieutenant Ertlin Kondracke, whose Lancer was under repair just adjacent.

'Gentlemen, thank you both for coming to see me.' He was a senior captain, in charge of a fleet destroyer; there was no way they wouldn't. His politeness warned them something was up, though.

'I wish this was simple ship visiting; instead, I have a problem and a possible solution to put to you.' Lennart was, rarely, properly and impeccably uniformed; his typical state of half undress wouldn't do, not for this. He had to look as thoroughly, officially imperial as possible.

Kondracke looked barely old enough for his command, something made worse by the sling on his arm. He looked like a child who had fallen out of a tree. Elstrand was fair- haired and red faced, looked more like a prosperous bantha rancher than a fleet officer.

'What is it, Captain?'

'You were very quick to come to support us.' Lennart said. 'I'm guessing you don't get too many opportunities to use your guns in anger?' the young man's face opened up.

'Captain, the local rebels are driving me mad. We hear snatches of comm, catch bursts of drive light, chase broken holonet threads, they're there. They have to be. We never get within gun range of them. Well, until now.'

'Same situation. We have the sense that we're being played with.' Elstrand added. 'Your ship's seen more action in two weeks than the sector fleet has in two years.'

Lennart nodded. 'They have come gunning for us, and as a result of that we have taken down and brainripped enough of them that we now have more to go on than the sector fleet. Enough, I think.'

'So where do we fit in?' Elstrand asked. He realised a second later that he hadn't called his superior officer 'Sir'; significant breach of discipline. Two seconds after that it sank in that Lennart hadn't called him on it.

'The information from the captured frigate strongly indicates the rebels have a very strong presence in the sector, protecting a hidden facility.' Hidden in plain sight, behind the Ubiqtorate.

There was another double-play going on there, especially with an alien Moff, Lennart could almost taste the edges of it. 'Sector command doesn't want us to go after it.'

'What?' Kondracke shouted. 'They're- they're allowing this?'

'I hoped you'd react like that.'

'Allow me to second my junior colleague's outrage, Sir.' Elstrand said.

'It wouldn't be the first do not engage order in the navy's history, or the least well thought out- your Moff told my Navigator that he was leading the rebels into a trap. Lulling them into a false sense of security.' Lennart's tone indicated what he thought of that.  
'We have more than enough real work to do in this sector without political bullsh- er, interference, Sir.' This sector had a lot of money spent on it by the Republic Terraforming Agency, and relatively little of it wisely.

Four running ecological catastrophes, one imminent nova, two alien species, one economically expansionist and one too widespread to be anything like as peaceful as they seemed.

'I know. Which is why I intend to use the standing orders of the Imperial Starfleet on supporting other ships to get around that,' Lennart informed them, watching their enthusiasm grow, 'and set up a very public, very noticeable meeting engagement. Are you with me?' He hardly had to ask; they were.

'Do you know what the most annoying thing about being a part- time white hat is?' Aldrem asked the rest of his team, rolling out of the line of fire behind a prickly shrub, one of many in the artificial jungle.

'Not being allowed to shoot each other.' Gendrik snarled back, annoyed. For people whose jobs revolved around shooting and being shot at, an alarming number of Stormtroopers seemed to enjoy it as a hobby as well. 'Playing with fresh meat' also came pretty high on the list.

It was a triple function facility; backup life support and food production, recreation, training ground. It could have passed for a botanical garden, if it wasn't for the stun blaster bolts going back and forward. Surprisingly, the plants didn't react badly to being stunned; some of them even thrived under it. Just as well, considering.

The troopers had reacted fairly predictably to having a turret crew team dumped on them; they had done their duty, coldly and professionally. When no one who might be disturbed was looking, they laughed their asses off. The fifteen gunners had been thrown in at the deep end. Fitness training, weapons training - Suluur had dented their smugness a little by outshooting all of the instructors with a heavy rifle - survival training, and exercises like this.

They called it 'tactical awareness'; the list to volunteer as opposing force was long. A chance to shoot navy - why not?

The control chamber had a dozen troopers in it, ten more than necessary.

'Preliminary evaluation - wash them out. Transfer them to the Starfleet.' The staff sergeant in the master control seat said.

'That would be inappropriate, Sergeant. They're not here to learn to be stormtroopers, they're here to learn to leave the close assault business to the professionals.' One of the spectators - Omega-blue-17-Aleph One - said.

'Three of them are enjoying it, Sir Scan Tech Suluur, PO Hruthhal, Weapon Mechanic (Leading) Tarshkavik - they could do well with proper training. In fact Suluur may be too good for a rookie. He's done this before.'

'They all have, at least once.'

'They could be useful, Sir. The senior chief's the best shot with an emplacement weapon I've ever seen. Although I do not understand how he achieved his rank.' The sargeant's scorn - and envy - was evident in his voice.

'In the army he would be a Specialist-9, but the star fleet has no efficient way of dealing with men of high skill and low fitness for responsibility - short of making them junior lieutenants.'

Fifteen minutes, it was supposed to take, to set up an E-Web.

Those fifteen minutes included leveling the tripod, building up an earth and ablative foamcrete berm to protect it, digging in the generator, making contact with neighbouring units, setting up aim point and fire arc markers in the enhanced sight system, and getting the rest of the squad in place to provide defensive crossfire and keep any approaching grenadiers' heads down.

'Crash Action'- plonk the damned thing down any way it went and hose the target- took ten seconds, if that.

Aldrem had taken to the E-web instantly, and had been overheard wondering whether he could get one assigned to himself, personally, and how he could probably fit it on a repulsorsled, and wouldn't planet leave be much safer with their own organic fire support?

Even most of his own team thought he was nuts. They knew he was kidding, but they still didn't trust him.

'Areath, go right, round that funky thing with the blue flowers and tendrils. If it tries to eat you, vape it.'

'With an exercise blaster hardwired to stun. Right.'

'Then kriffing well beat it to death.' Aldrem said, popping up and firing a long burst at a low, spreading, vaguely animate looking food plant.

Three stormtroopers, well out of the line of fire, shot back at him, he dived for cover, one of them connected and he went down twitching like a rattlesnake; Suluur shot back, rapidly dropping two of them. The old reflexes were coming back now, which was probably bad for him. He dropped behind a set of trays, looked around to see who was still on his feet.

Stang, he thought, that looked far too competent. He stuck his head up, looking for a way to get shot that didn't seem too suspicious.

'Advisory, Sir.' The training staff sergeant, KF-5614, asked Aleph One. 'Are there any other considerations we should be aware of?'

'In other words, why am I interested?'

'I never before appreciated how large the difference is between 'unflinching' and 'too dumb to duck', Sir.' KF-5614 said.

'You think we're beating a set of learned reflexes into them that will make them less efficient in their primary job?'

'I believe that may be the case. This is the basic training the Starfleet gets them to unlearn when it goes about turning them into efficient gunners, Sir.'

'Don't worry. These are some of the ship's problem children. They'll do something absurd and be put on an intensive gunnery refresher course sooner or later.'

'I see, Sir.' The training sergeant wanted to know more, but was too disciplined to ask.

Captain broadcasting to the crew;  
'All hands, this is Captain Lennart. As most of you know, we've been busy lately. Unfortunately, it turns out that there's a reason for this. This sector is quiet not because there are no rebels, but because it seems they have an interest in not drawing attention. They have strong base facilities they do not want to have exposed, so when we blundered in, they tried twice for a relatively cheap kill, which only got me…interested.

'If they have any sense, they'll now be keeping their heads down and waiting for us to go away. Unfortunately, events indicate they do in fact have some sense. What I think happened is an Alliance internal communications SNAFU; regional command sent units to assault us and the tender, local command threw a fit when they found out. They have too much of a logistic base here to hazard it. We're more or less operational now, and I would be pleasantly surprised if they decided to try again.

'Coincidentally, and I know some rumours have been emanating from the fighter wing, the sector Moff has asked us to go away too. He says he has things in hand. This is a Moff who let things get this bad in the first place, so colour me skeptical.

'We are going to be following a course of action that may seem…dubious, verging on outright disloyalty.

'There won't be time for detailed explanations, not until afterwards, but we are acting in the best interests of the Empire- under cover of a thick screen of bluff and poodoo.

'Some of you who have been with this ship longest will remember similar operations. You know what a high WTF factor they usually have. Our objective is to lure Alliance forces into a straight fight; but it is going to be a twisty, windy path getting them there.

'Internal operations will continue as normal, and if external events confuse you, spare a thought for the command team who actually have to manage it all. Black Prince Actual out.'

Around the ship, various people took the news in their own way.

Hathren, J., rebel spy in residence, was dumbfounded. There were still a lot of her people in the cells, she daren't do anything about helping them without blowing her cover. Yet. She had a half-formed escape plan, and it would be easier and safer if it was a mass escape. But how much more would there be to find out?

Most Rebel captains - certainly the very formal Mon Cal - would tell their crews far less than this, never mind Imperial Starfleet.

This was professional opportunity beyond her wildest dreams. She knew perfectly well she was probably going to stay too long, to draw too much attention and give herself away - the lure was very strong.

Not the only one. The man she had been assigned to, Mirhak-Ghulej, spent most of his time sitting on the edge of his bunk, looking lost. He twitched, he ranted, he sat in black depression.

She was used to handling awkward customers; she needed all that experience. His world had just turned round and bit him.

The other people she had to work with - they were, in a word, different. Whatever popular support the Rebellion had, the overwhelming majority of those at the sharp end were there for a reason. Some ideology, some incident, some Imperial brutality. This bunch was - the word she was looking for, she finally decided, was normal.

For the given circumstances, of course. They were mostly male, surrounded by high technology, with duties, responsibilities and enough firepower to depopulate a world down to the algae, but given that, basically stable.  
For a given, bored, grumpy, practical joke ridden value of stable, anyway. He took no notice of her, until much later that day; she came back to his cabin, after fetching a snack from the galley, and found someone had pumped helium into his quarters' air-system.

'Someone', internal arrangements varied; on most ships, life support belonged to Logistics and Supply branch, on the Black Prince the lifesystem belonged to Engineering. Lennart had long since given up trying to hold back their colonial tendencies. Their version of the shoulder patch had the knight holding a hydrospanner, as often as not.

He started to bawl her out, stiff faced, harsh and typically Imperial, but it came out in such a high-pitched whine, she started to chuckle. He shouted at her more, which only made her worse, until she doubled over in - the helium was wafting out of the room - squeaky laughter. As she did, she noticed the glint of a lens poking round the corridor corner.

The Exec's quarters were the largest and best appointed unit in a quarters block directly adjacent to damage control central; in combat, the captain ran things from the bridge, the chief engineer from the MCR, the Assistant Chiefs oversaw their components of the ship, one of the two Deputy Chiefs went to the bridge, one to DC central.  
The way it was supposed to work was that the exec made decisions from the operational point of view, prioritising what they needed fixed, and the deputy chief assigned assets to do it. It looked as if he had decided that what needed to be done was embarrass the exec, live on camera.

He was still shouting, grabbed her and tried to get her to stand up straight, managed it - she was too busy laughing - tried to slap her. She moved instinctively to block, caught herself just as she was about to slam the edge of her hand into his throat.

He looked as surprised as she was. She stepped back along the corridor, breathed deeply to get any helium out of her lungs, and said, 'If you really, truly cannot see the funny side of this, then I reckon you deserve everything the captain did to you.'

That boggled him. He couldn't. She took his arm, guided him back into his chambers as she would a half-cut idiot out of the door of the inn.

She sat him down, controlled her own laughter well enough to talk, squeakily.

'I looked at your file, as well.' She admitted, knowing how much trouble it could get her into. 'You're Mr. Clean, aren't you? Never been on the receiving end…not even violations of uniform codes, never had so much as a civil parking ticket. What I think this is about is, well, showing you the crappy end of the stick. Showing you - from the victim's point of view - what the punishments its your job to hand out mean.'

At least he was looking up at her now.  
'How would you react to someone who took a disciplining this badly?' she decided on a harder approach. It sounded absurd under the helium, but what wouldn't?

'I'd…they would be obviously unfit, so I would keep riding them until they were broke or resigned from the service.' He said, thinly.

'So now you're punishing yourself as well. Great Space, how did you ever get this far? What you have to do now is to prove that you are fit, to yourself and to him. Those recommendations should take almost as long to read as they will to write; how does he expect to do that? What shortcut is Captain Lennart planning to use? Work it out, exploit it yourself.'

His face brightened; he should have thought of that himself, but it was still a good idea. The air was starting to clear; evidently they had given up on the helium.

'The other thing is to work out what to say on those recommendations, to prove you deserve your job back.'  
He was already moving towards his desk and the stack of datapads with the files.

Franjia Rahandravell and Aron Jandras didn't dare say what they were thinking, because they were being detailed for the craziest mission either of them had ever heard of. It would only have been a long string of swear words, anyway.

'They call it a destabilisation operation, I believe.' Olleyri had them in the ready room of Alpha squadron.

'They can call it anything they like, I think it's crazy.' Aron was standing, leaning over the desk, trying not to shout at the commander air group, and getting close to ceasing to care.

'That's exactly why you're the man for the job.'

'What,' Franjia asked, 'because he has no faith in this, that makes him appropriate? And what about me?'

'You're right. It is fundamentally insane. The situation that makes it necessary is demented. So it fits perfectly.' Olleyri told them.

'I'm not that good an actress.'

'We're not going to get them to break cover for anything less. Think about it. To get the Rebs to come out to play, we need to give them an objective they can't ignore, and a situation they can realistically do something about. We hand our captives over to the locals and appear to sail off, they organise a public, judicial murder of our prisoners - doesn't that disgust you? Even a little?'

'Would it shock you,' Franjia asked him - both of them, really - 'if I said no?'

'Not much, no.' Olleyri replied. 'The reason its you - rebel frequencies?'

'Why,' Aron rounded on her, 'did you have to work it out?'

'As well hung for a bantha as a nerf. What's really going on?' she asked Olleyri.

Olleyri didn't know. He tried to bluff it out. 'If you know, who else do you think might find out?'

'This should be a purely volunteer job.' Aron said. 'Kriffing espionage detail - I didn't join up for this, I'm not trained for it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be any good at it.'

'Nonsense. Command is at least half acting, you ought to know that, and most of the rest is paperwork. The practical rebels will be overjoyed to have two experienced pilots, the idealistic side - it's just the sort of fairytale they love to lap up. And you are going to lead them into such a trap, any Imperial officer would have been proud to set it up.'

'I get shivers,' Aron said, 'when anyone starts talking about me in the past tense.'

'Kriff, I didn't mean that; you are supposed to come back.' Admittedly, he had no idea how. 'But you are definitely supposed to go.' He handed each of them a datapad. 'Read, memorise, destroy. Report to me when you're ready, dismissed.'

They saluted, turned to leave.

In the corridor outside Alpha's bay,  
'Franjia-' Aron began. He hardly ever called her that, and especially not outside the cockpit.

She turned and looked down at him. 'Yes, Squadron Leader?'

'We're supposed to be striking out on our own, rediscovering our consciences and our individuality.' He was standing very close; she put a hand on his chest, gently pushed him back.

'No.' He looked hurt, shrivelled. 'I shared a bed for almost a year with Ezirrn Tellick.' She confirmed what he knew. She would have added that she didn't come as a perk of the job, didn't think she needed to go that far.

'I know, Franjia,' he said, sounding pleading, 'it's too soon - but dammit, by the time you feel, you're ready, you know what I mean, we'll be "just friends" '- or dead- 'and it'll be too late.'

'It's too soon for you, too.' She said. 'There's a mess in your head, of anger at being in this, envy, jealousy, a little lust and all the usual madnesses of the fighter pilot- I don't want you to pour that over me. Or expose you to mine.'

She turned on her heel, heading for the simulators; she wanted to put in some B-wing time. Just in case.

'Captain, request permission to volunteer in place of Flight Lieutenant Rahandravell.' OB173 barged straight into Lennart's office and asked him, point blank. Actually, those were words he didn't want to think about.

'Why do you want to do that?' he asked, brain temporarily in boggle mode.

'I'm simply the most appropriate person for the job.' She said, knowing he would guess that it wasn't that simple, and trying to come up with a cover story.

'How do you know,' Lennart recovered and asked her, slowly, 'what the job is?'

'Guesswork. Politics. Intuition. That and I asked her.'

'If she was fool enough to tell you, then anyone would be better for the job.' Lennart agreed. 'She came away unharmed?'

'The most efficient interrogation device ever issued; the human tongue.' Only so because the troopers usually came with one, costing the army nothing.

'Can you fly a B-wing?'

' "You don't fly a B-wing; you just sit in the cockpit while it plods along." ' She quoted Franjia. 'To that standard, yes.'

'So tell me about your cover story.' Lennart asked, professionally.

I'm a talent scout for a dark force adept, good enough to step straight into the ranks of the Sovereign Protectors, and the only reason I haven't risen higher to become an adept in my own right is - I lack the hard edge of moral courage, the guts to take responsibility for the pain and misery I inflict.

I prefer to be told what to do. Show me the path, be it never so black, and I will walk it - but do not ask me to choose it for myself. To that extent, at least, I am the prisoner of my clone heritage.

And I want to be somewhere else, while the situation I have - I hope - set up for you starts to bite. Largely because, I have told myself, I can appear to be on your side, and manipulate you appropriately.

She might be able to say that to him, eventually. In the meantime she settled for 'I'd need naval cover, a divisional officer or someone in Supply branch with part responsibility for the prisoners-'

'If that's the best you can do, forget it.' Lennart said. 'You haven't had any contact with them, any leak there - and there may be, accidental or deliberate - means your head on the block and, worse, a blown operation.' He was deliberately brutal about that.

'I don't think you can pass for anything other than a trained killer. Start with a feasible motive, then sort out who could be credibly found holding it.'

'Professional jealousy.' She said, straight away. 'Responsibility for them was taken away from me - I don't have to pose to pass as an interrogator - and I got stroppy about it. I'm a talker; I cajole them, trick them into giving up their secrets. The new man was more the racks and pincers type, typical bloodthirsty blundering Imperial, half sadist and half moron.' She smiled at that one; a lot of the Rebels did think in stereotypes, but the smarter ones - for instance, intelligence officers - didn't.

'I reacted badly to that - crisis of conscience, to the extent of breaking him with his own tools. Then I had nothing else to do but run for it, and where else but to the Alliance?'

'Very nice.' Lennart said. 'lots of small problems that can be plugged, and one insoluble one. The rebels have undoubtedly been guessing, they may even have got it right. The chief reason they haven't tried to employ their political weapon is that they are smart enough to know that, even if they say the truth, without backing it with evidence - in practical terms it's just a conspiracy theory. You can tell them entirely too much about what to think, where to look. That makes it an unjustifiable risk. You would be better for the job - if it wasn't for that. Request denied, dismissed.'

She looked worried as she left, probably for herself. That was backwards; his instincts twitched a little. He would think about that later, there was another piece of the puzzle to move.

This time it was just him on his own; Aldrem wondered if that was a good or a bad thing.

'Sit down, Senior Chief.' The captain told him. Oh crap, he was really in for it.

'Least things first; from your, ah, top end heavy perspective, an E-web may seem little different from a common blaster pistol - but I assure you; no.'

The captain was being flippant. He had probably decided to keelhaul him after all.

'Your team is returned to normal duty, I'm going to need you to do some trick shooting for me. In about four or five hours, our rebuilt pair of B-wings will be checked out, and they will be beyond accurate LTL range before anyone realises they're not coming back. You are going to try to shoot them down, and miss. Very narrowly.'

'It's a setup, Sir?' Aldrem asked.

'Yes. Do not actually hit them. Two other things- your local control op.'

'Areath Suluur? He's an essential part of the team, Sir.' Aldrem stood up for his man.

'He's almost certainly a deserter from the Republic navy, part of one of the clone gun teams on an early Venator; he spent ten years AWOL at the end of the Clone Wars, before joining the Imperial Starfleet under a false ID.'

The senior chief looked horrified. 'Sir, if that's true-'

'If I had actually bothered to check up on it, I'm fairly sure I would be certain. I haven't bothered. Just tell him to be slightly less effective in man to man combat, because if I can work it out, I'm sure the Legion's veterans can.'

Aldrem was puzzled, but not unhappy. 'Thank you, Sir.'

'I'm not going to throw away a good gun team. Last thing, have you bumped into your girlfriend recently?'

'If this is about the fraternisation regs, it's not an issue, I mean yes, but the rank thing-'

'She's already done one major service for the ship, by stopping the exec looking more than mildly foolish, and as I had hoped, injecting him with a dose of classic Rebel sticktoitiveness. Under her influence he should do well.'

'That's good-' then Aldrem's brain caught up with his ears. 'Rebel?'

'Afraid so.' The captain handed him the message pad; the only thing he had done was blank out the part about Aldrem passing for fifteen. 'It raises a couple of interesting questions.'

'But she doesn't, she isn't, she can't-' Aldrem was trying not to believe his own eyes.

'Does, is and can, but I do have some leeway in this. What I want is for her to defect to us and turn states' evidence, what happens then - she shouldn't be killed, but it could still be fairly unpleasant. If she can help us reel the rebel force we're after in, if you can turn her all the way, and I think you may be able to, I'll give the bride away at your wedding myself.'

'Sir, I mean, I see it, but I don't believe it. I just can't get it into my gut that she's a Reb.'

'That doesn't make it wrong for you to like her, or unbelievable for her to like you; it just makes it very awkward. Go and put it right.' Lennart ordered him, confident-sounding.

'Sir, can I-'

'By all means, talk to your team about it, but no further. After all, as willful as she obviously is, she belongs on this ship.'


	11. Chapter 11

The final briefing was delivered by Commander Brenn himself. Normally it would have been a relatively junior officer's job, but there was nothing normal about this situation. The two fighter pilots opposite him certainly didn't think so.

'In theory,' he began, 'you're going to pretend to defect and feed them false information. In practise, we're sending you to take those pieces of dreck back and trade them in for a pair of X- wings.'

It was a fairly crude attempt to lighten the mood; even Aron thought so. It didn't stop him laughing, briefly.

'You have read the briefs?'

'Of course.' Franjia said. 'Someone worked very hard, polishing that plan to the point where it almost makes sense.'

Brenn glared at her. Parts of it had been his idea.

'Just getting into practise, Sir. After all, we are supposed to be joining the ranks of anarchy.'

'Don't believe it. The rebels run their armed services on the old Republic model - the higher command levels may be fractionated and disorganised enough, but they are strong on the minor discipline.' Brenn reminded them.

'Military police; the common enemy?' Aron suggested.

'Not that far from the truth. You will be interrogated, we expect the urgency of what you have to tell them to push them into a rush job. Some will be suspicious-'

'Rightly.' Franjia pointed out. 'I would be very suspicious of a Rebel defector to us.'

'Maybe.' Brenn knew, more or less, what Captain Lennart was planning. 'On the other hand, some of them will want to believe you.'

'So what you're saying is divide and conquer, but take care not to look like it.' Aron said. 'Have I got time to go on a refresher course for escape and evasion?'

'Getting you out is less than predictable. No preset plan for that would be enough.'

'Who did we annoy to get this job?' Franjia asked.

'Who else would you send? The Alliance is so fighter-centric, you're the obvious choice. None of our people are from Alderaan, good riddance to it, or anywhere else the Empire's sat on heavily recently. If there are any experienced ISB or Ubiqtorate watchers on board, they're so experienced that we don't know who they are to ask them. Our organic intel consists of subsections of Navigation and Com-Scan who know too much to be allowed to go, or stormtroopers who simply wouldn't be believable. You were unlucky enough to stand out.'

'I promise, Commander, that if we get back alive, I will never, ever distinguish myself ever again.' Aron snarled at him.

Franjia managed not to say what came into her mind- that shoving a laser cannon up the chief navigator's arse and pulling the trigger would be a distinction of a sort. 'Sir, we hate this plan.' Was what she actually said. 'Why doesn't that rule us out?'

'Because you can make it work. All you're doing is bombing them with payloads of lies instead of proton torps. Has anyone told you to shut up and soldier yet?' Brenn replied.

They got the hint.

'Officially, this meeting has been about my giving you a flight test program to conduct with the reconstructed fighters. A tactical evaluation exercise. Unofficially, it has too.' Brenn said.

'As you are going to be masquerading as Rebels, I suppose I should wish you - what is it they say, "may the Force be with you?" '

'Try "Farce", Sir.' Aron stood, saluted, Franjia did the same, they turned to go.

In the corridor outside Commander Brenn's office, he started to say 'Flight Lieutenant Rahandravell-'

'We make a good combat team.' She cut him short - then changed her mind about what she intended. 'Do you think we could pretend to an, ah, sufficiently tortured relationship to catch their attention, serve as motive and distraction?'

'Sufficiently tortured would be the right term for it.' He said, wondering what she meant. Did she mean it literally, was she teasing him, or for whatever reason torturing herself - probably a combination of the first two. Which was, in itself, warped. If he was right, she was asking him to prove that he could fake it, lie to her with believable passion, as a pass to get to the real thing, which - suddenly amateur spying seemed relatively straightforward.

Which was probably exactly how she wanted him to feel, and now his head was starting to hurt. 'I'm probably going to regret this, but yes. I think.' He decided.

'Well, we're definitely going to regret having anything to do with B-wings,' she covered her relief with flippancy, 'so let's get on with it.'

Port-4 main turret, bunk spaces; most of the team were catching up on their rest. They had been officially notified that they were to stop their 'liaison' mission. Wonderful what you can cover up with a single well chosen word, isn't it, Suluur had thought. They had celebrated with a round of pillows, and only himself and Aldrem were awake.

'What is it, Pel?' The turret chief obviously wanted to ask him something. Probably going to be bad.

'The skipper himself spoke to me about- a couple of things. Was it me, or did I see a few of the white-hats pacing it out afterwards, trying to work out what we had done and how fast?'

'What did Captain Lennart say?' Suluur asked, instantly alert.

'Um.' Aldrem said. This could be touchy. 'He said that he didn't care much whether or not you were what it looked like you were,'

'Which is?' Suluur said cautiously, after mentally decoding the gibberish. No security presence, so he was in no real danger- even if he could bring himself to hurt the crew chief.

Aldrem looked round carefully - as if he could spot listening devices - and said, in a whisper, 'A deserter from the Republic Navy.'

'Very nice of him not to care. Covering something like that up could get him in a world of dreck.' Suluur said, sounding much calmer than he felt.

'Is it true?' Aldrem asked.

'Did he tell you to ask?'

'No. No, he didn't, and he said he wasn't going to. Also said you needed to get shot more often because if he could work it out-'

'Yes. Yes, it's true.' Suluur admitted. It was a long complicated story, one he more than half wanted to tell.

'Then I'm going to need your help.' Aldrem moved straight into that, careful not to ask why or how. Not yet.

'What? You're not planning to run, are you? Are you really that sold on that woman that you'd take the chance?' Suluur didn't believe it- Aldrem could be that crazed, but not this time.

'No, look-' he did, glancing around again, all still asleep. 'I need to get her to desert to us.'

Suluur started to ask who from, got it, then decided to ask anyway. 'I'd look like a kriffing idiot if I assumed I knew what you meant, went ahead and acted on it, and turned out to be wrong, so you had better tell me who from.'

'And convince you I haven't gone from hallucinations to outright paranoia- who else? Them. The enemy.'

'Big R?' he was referring to the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

'She's some kind of spy for them, she's been sending messages.'

'You're taking this very calmly.' Suluur told the senior chief. As for whether it was true or not - possible.

'Well, I couldn't start breaking down and gibbering in front of the Captain, could I? After that, the time never seemed right.'

'There is a right time, when what you see, and especially what you know is going to happen next, gets to be too much to bear.' Suluur said, slowly and reflectively. 'A decent commander, a competent commander, gives you confidence and hope, postpones the day. An incompetent rat-bastard-'

Aldrem was just sensitive enough to try not to let his own urgency show. 'Areath, if you need to talk about this.' What he wanted to do was scream at Suluur to help him with his problem.

'Some time.' Suluur, on the other hand, was sensitive enough to pick up on it. 'Are you sure you want to help her change sides, rather than just... run?'

Aron and Franjia, suited and helmeted, checked out the rebuilt Rebel bombers as planned. Neither of them trusted their own acting abilities enough to go through it barefaced. Fooling their colleagues, people who knew them, would be harder than foxing strangers, wouldn't it? It had better.

The filed flight plan had them following a spiral outward to distance, then a series of standard flight manoeuvres, then a return to base.

For a moment both of them were tempted to just fly the set plan, land, and see if Brenn could come up with any charge even remotely public to do them on.

The captain certainly could. And after all, the objective was right.

The initial tests went perfectly to script- it was as bad as they thought.

'I want to see what the actual peak performance is - I'm shutting everything down except the engines.'

Franjia advised, as they were both nearing the point in the other plan laid down as breakaway.

'Tensors and compensators, too?' Aron asked, drymouthed. Go-code received and accepted.

'Congratulations, you remembered something mechanical - we'll make a Starwing pilot out of you yet.'

'Anything other than a kriffing B-wing.' He said, turning the brickish fighter to follow her.

Actually, they weren't that bad. Short, low power thruster bells were their main curse - the power systems put out watts on par with the Starwing, if not a shade better, but they had to butcher the engines to actually fit torp launchers in.

As planned, Black Prince called them - on main intership, not the fighter control bands. That was supposed to look like a simple mistake, that would 'accidentally' allow them to be overheard.

'Epsilon Test, that is an unauthorised manoeuvre. Return to the flight plan at once.' Olleyri, in flight control, ordered.

No response. As planned. Any rebel agents on the planet - which there apparently were - would have noticed nothing more than two speeding B-wings, which was still enough of a contradiction to attract interest.

'Scramble Beta squadron.' The order, open mike, was heard by all.

Aron and Franjia kept building vector, one eye on the monitors - engine temps rising - one eye on what passed for a nav unit.

Beta cleared the bay. 'Epsilon Test, are you in trouble? Do you require assistance?'

'Beta One, Epsilon Test - emergency. Engines overheating, throttle locked, ejection systems disabled. Get a rescue shuttle out here.' Aron replied, sounding genuine. The thought of being in that situation helped.

'Epsilon Test lead, burn towards us, I think we can shoot the canopy off.' Beta One decided.

Franjia and Aron both boggled at that. Somebody had far too much faith in their skills.

'Command, negative, negative, clear the line of fire.' Flight control announced, on the proper bands this time.

Port-4's alarms went off, cutting Suluur's and Aldrem's conversation short. The collection of sleepy gunners jerked awake, blasted back to consciousness. The drill was well established. The emergency action bell meant drop everything and get to your duty station, from wherever you were and whatever you were doing. It took the lead pair thirty seconds to get to main gun control, and they both stood down a step- Suluur working Fendon's board until he got there, Aldrem tapping into comms.

'Control, what's going on?' he said, genuinely startled; he had forgotten about the set up.

'Our test flight's gone rogue- attempting defection. Shoot them.'

The guns came up to power, just as Fendon arrived. 'Oh.' He said, looking disappointed; they took their proper seats.

'Control,' Aldrem asked, remembering, 'are you sure?'

'Acting Exec's orders. Do it.'

'You're convinced it's not just a malfunction? You know I need confirmation.'

The blips that overlay the two fighters changed colour. Rebel red. 'There's your confirmation.'  
Aldrem settled in, rotated the turret to bear, set the gross motion tracker; 'They're over dex; 3hk out, this is going to be barrage fire.'

3hk; h-hundred, k-thousand. Faster than spelling it out. They were flying straight courses, slight tangent though; the cruciform shape of the B-wing was tempting.

For a second he wondered if it would be possible to bracket it perfectly, one bolt each side of the cockpit, one bolt each side of the fin - at better than three seconds round trip delay, against a target that would start stunting when it got locked on to, probably not. And he was supposed to miss.

'Fendon, set sub-2 up for flak bursts, one hundred thousand and rct, set sub-1 for stutter, give me fifteen thousand.'

One hundred thousand terawatts on the flak bursts, rangefinder controlled timed detonation, fifteen thousand terawatt shots cycling as fast as sub-1 could put them out. A tiny fraction of capacity, but more than enough for the target.

He played with the shot dispersal a little; pointed on to the fleeing B-wings, made the deflection, held his finger on the trigger and moved the grip in a small circle around the aimpoint.

Four screaming streaks of green, one burst low, right and behind the B-wings, one left and a shade low, one almost directly above and ahead, one right, above and ahead.

'That's a warning shot?' Aron screamed at Franjia. Their fighters kicked on the fringes of the blast waves- dumb luck or very, very good shooting to narrowly let them live.

'Nav laid in, get out of here.' She shouted back, shoving the B-wing into a wild half- bank, half- roll. The first handful of stutter shot screamed by close to her- she knew this was daft. The more she manoeuvred, the more likely she was to simply fly into a shot.

The second seemed to assume she was going to break low and right. A tactical memory - steering for the fall of shot - came back to her, and she turned to follow them. Sure enough, the next volley of flak bursts would have been right down her mean line of vector.

Aron pulled the red lever - activated hyperdrive, and a sequence of shot followed him, across the track of the ship lunging for conversion threshold; Franjia followed, before the guns could turn back on her. Safely away.

The Lancer, partially repaired, turned to lumber after them. This was part of the plan; so was the argument Lennart and Kondracke - skipper of the Lancer - had on open com channel.

It started with Kondracke saying how usual it was to have to pull the destroyer's fat out of the fire, passed rapidly through accusations of blind incompetence on both sides and peaked in his accusing Black Prince of being a nest of traitors.

To most of the watchers, it probably seemed as if the Lancer was escaping from the destroyer as much as leaving in pursuit.

'Fire direction, they got away. Like trying to pick up a grain of sand with a piledriver.' Aldrem announced.  
'Port-4, that doesn't make sense.'

'You noticed?' Aldrem tried not to be that sarcastic, and failed. 'Are we clear to stand down?'

'Checking- yes. Release to normal watch pattern.'

'Right.' Aldrem looked round at Suluur. 'Can you give me turret internal, and isolate us from the rest of the ship?'

'Done.' Suluur set it up. 'I know what this is about, yes?'

'Afraid so. Team, I don't know about assigned, but we've definitely been detailed to something that I reckon is out and out espionage work. It's also a painful subject for me personally, something I expect you'll enjoy ragging me about later.'

'Gun crew, storm trooper training, now intel? What's next, reassigned to fill two vacancies in the starfighter wing?' Hruthhal asked.

'Remind me to put in for qualification bonuses on the strength of that.' Aldrem postponed it, hoping one of them would work it out.

'Hold on.' Tarshkavik- gun maintenanceman, looking silly in his balloon- bulging, perfectly mirrored, magnetic shielded suit.

Ground combat exposed him to less energy than his everyday job, one reason he had taken to it so well; the handling suit he wore was attached by a ten centimetre thick umbilical to the turret's heat and static dispersion systems, otherwise he would have taken it with him.

'This is about that woman, isn't it? So the espionage connection- ah.'

'So it wasn't just your dashing charm, then?' the other subsection leader, Gendrik, asked.

'Considering she was still talking to me after I nearly threw up on her, I should have known it was too good to be true.' Aldrem said, suspecting that if he didn't say it they would.

'She snuck on board to spy on us?' Hruthhal wanted Aldrem to confirm.

'That's the theory, yes.' Aldrem admitted.

'So,' Suluur backed him up, 'if we promised to buy you an E-web for your name day, on condition you shot her with it, what would you do?' It got a chuckle, and it let Aldrem handle it as seriously, or not, as he wanted.

'I need to talk to her, and I want you there for moral support when I do. Not fire support.'

Fendon shut down the turret, it took ten minutes for everyone to get out of protective gear and into day uniforms.

Aldrem checked; as a steward, she had no fixed schedule any more than the officer she looked after did, and he didn't like the thought of knocking on the exec's door looking for her. Only thing for it, though.

He did, his fourteen men behind him; it was the exec who answered. Looking past him, Aldrem could see rank after rank of protocol droids. What was going on?

'Commander, Sir, I'm looking for Steward Jhareylia Hathren. This isn't a private visit, Sir, I wish it was.' He went on, before Mirhak-Ghulej could lose his temper with him. 'Check with the Captain, Sir.'

The exec thought hard about it. 'If you turn out to be lying, I'll have you used for reactor shelding.'

'That might be a less painful alternative, Sir.' Aldrem said, sincerely.

Mirhak-ghulej looked closely at the senior chief. His file had come up, and the exec's memory was good; maybe too good, on occasion. It kept him brooding over the past.

Aldrem had risen rapidly to his present rank on the strength of his specialist skills, and then stuck there, failing the academy entrance exam twice - both times on leadership issues. Attitude problem, the file had said. Utterly incapable of providing ideological and doctrinal support and guidance.

Some of his irresponsibility came from that root cause, Mirhak-Ghulej thought; knowing that he was never going to be asked to be responsible, and had no more to gain by trying to be.

'You wish to see your girlfriend, on ship business.' Sarcasm dripping off his voice. 'What?'

'Can I speak freely, Sir?' the chief sounded desperate.

'If you are fool enough to think you won't be handing your career to me on a plate, you might be fool enough to make this entertaining. Speak.'

'Sir, the captain's got it in for me as well, and this is my dreck job to do. The only thing you could do would be to make it worse.' Aldrem took a chance on saying.

'Why shouldn't I do that?' the temporarily disemployed exec asked, thinking that perhaps if he did, it would make him feel better.

'Because he actually needs this job to get done.'

Just as well the exec's face was pretty impassive at the best of times; it meant Aldrem didn't realise how much trouble he was in.

Jhareylia was busy supervising the protocol droids; they were doing the datawork. She heard the tail end of the conversation, recognised Aldrem's voice; came to the door, saw the entire turret crew behind him.

'Pellor, really, when you come to court, you're not supposed to bring your own jury.'

He turned round to them and said 'See why I wanted you here?' and to Mirhak-Ghulej, 'Sir, you can screw this up, or not.'

'I want a full report.' He snapped. Jhareylia ducked under his arm and out into the corridor with him.

He looks terrible, she thought. Half-slept and stressed out. I wonder how he scrubs up? 'Where are we going?'

'Well, my first thought was a nice stroll in the training garden, but this lot might mutiny.' The growl from behind them served to prove that. 'We could go down to engineering, find an inspection port and watch the ion drives glow?'

'Considering what I've heard about them, that might be just as dangerous.'

'I knew it wouldn't take you long to find your way around this ship.' He bounced back at her.

Actually, she changed her mind, he looks about how I feel. Like something terrible is about to happen.

'There's always the water tanks; we use them as a swimming pool, but the white-hats use them as an exercise tank too. A hint; if you hear that strange coloured clouds have been seen in the exercise tanks, don't shower for a while. The filters are supposed to take it out, but I don't trust them myself.' He rambled.

She turned a corner at random; he followed her, she went down three more twists and turns. 'Where are we going?' he asked.

'Somewhere where we aren't expected. Somewhere we can sit and talk without anyone knowing we're there.' She said.

Kriff, he thought. If she's going where I think she's going with this, we have a crisis. We did anyway.  
Counting tags on the bulkhead, they were on the lower starboard side of the ship; quarters blocks, storage spaces, the forward end of the engineering workshop space, a few point defence turrets.

He pushed open a door into a storage room; realised it was a bad idea. 'We must be right against the outer hull, that's a blowout panel. I think this might be the wrong place.' Automating security had been tried and failed. Too easily cracked; human recognition worked better. This was still on the old system, the code locked door had opened for the transponder in his rank cylinder. Gunnery branch.

The room looked like a mesh of steel stalagmites, with a corresponding pattern of them hanging from the ceiling; three meter wide cones, marked with a handful of glyphs, access, handling points. Large enough, they loomed larger in the eye of an expert.

'I shouldn't think anyone comes down here if they can avoid it.'

'What are they? Some form of abstract sculpture?' she asked, looking innocent.

'Only if you consider 'kaboom' to be art…which personally I do, but I thought it was just me.' Aldrem said, quietly, trying not to breathe too hard.

'Chief?' Hruthhal asked. 'What are we doing with this lot? We don't have the launchers for them.'

'This is Commander Mirannon we're talking about here. Give him a couple of months.' Tarshkavik said.

'We can sit and talk here,' Aldrem turned to her, 'provided you don't mind my skin crawling so bad it tries to escape independently.'

'If you're scared, then I am too- but do you think anyone would come in here?'

'No-one in their right mind would be within ten kilometres of this lot.' Suluur stated.

She mentally compared that with the length of a star destroyer, took a deep breath, and sat down with her back against one of the antiship proton torpedoes. She couldn't actually touch the metal; the magazine safety systems wrapped a shield over it.

Aldrem sat down opposite her.

'Jhareylia, you know I'm not very…well informed outside my profession. It takes up most of my common sense.' He said, nervously looking at the torpedo and wishing it would take the rest; she couldn't help smiling.  
'The thing is…I'm supposed to tell you that, ah-'

'It's all right, Pellor, I know what you mean.' She said, hoping they were talking about the same thing.

'Then you will?' he said, face brightening.

'Um - perhaps I don't know what you mean.' She was confused now.

'Oh. Right. I wish anyone else but me had been sent to do this. Anyone. The captain thinks you're a rebel spy.'

'What do you think?' she asked him. This was the nightmare she had been half hoping wouldn't happen, half wanting to get it over with.

'I think I'd prefer it if it wasn't true.' He said, slow, sad and sincere.

'Does he have...evidence?' she asked, nervously.

'He thinks he has. Tell me it isn't so.'

'I could, but…' she could get angry with him, shout at him for taking the system's word over hers; demand that he trust her. That was why he had brought his friends. She couldn't fight her way out; too many of them for that, either. 'Would you hate me for it?'

'Eventually. Maybe. Look - we get away with a lot on this ship that we shouldn't be able to, because there was a monumental paperwork snafu when she was commissioned and we've been in no permanent command, with nobody's particular job to keep us orthodox, ever since. In fact, we're ahead of the game, because we're a theatre reserve unit, it's our job to keep others in line, so our loyalty is taken for granted as part of the system and we don't get watched as much as most ships. I'm not saying the rest of the Empire's like us. But are we that bad, really?'

'Yes, you are. Your commanding officer makes you do dreck jobs like arresting your girlfriend yourself.' She flashed back at him. 'You admit yourself that you're the exception that proves the rule.'

'Pel, it's not going to work.' Suluur said.

'Yes, it is, it has to. What do you think they - the regulatory branch and the organic intel and the legion's interrogators - would do to you, if they had an excuse? I don't want that to happen.'

'Listen to yourself!' she shouted at him. 'You admit you're afraid of what the Empire does to people, what it would do to you -or me - if it caught us - Pel, you're not a bad man at heart,' she blushed slightly, 'you can't approve. You can't want that to happen.'

'No but - I don't know what your parents told you, but I was an inner city kid. The closest we got to justice or any of that abstract crud was the idea that you stand by your friends, and try to hurt your enemies. Maybe there is some ideal concept, some big idea out there, but it's amazing just how straightforward galactic politics starts to look when you boil it down to gang kid logic.' All fourteen of the team behind him were nodding.

'It's not like that.' she said, passionately. 'This is about-'

'I do read, sometimes. The empire is average, it's us, it's Dexter and Aldric and Elan and Garvoth from down the road, it's - the Empire inherited the galaxy. Whatever that is, the Empire is - despite what those New Order nutcases tell you, the bulk of the Starfleet, even, is ordinary stiffs like us.'

'You've already said enough to get yourself into trouble.' Jhareylia said, almost demanding that it was so. 'I could walk out of here, steal a shuttle and escape to the alliance, and take all of you with me.'

'My career may be a dead end, but I'm not that crazy. Why - actually, what made you become a Rebel?'

'I told you, my parents had a light freighter.'

'What happened to it?' Aldrem asked her, softly.

'We were - just doing business as usual; it was a typical run, out of Correllia to Brentaal, and we were stopped by an Imperial interdictor. It boarded us, and murdered them.  
They hid me in one of the cargo pods; I heard the argument, and the shots, and the sound of my mother and father being dragged away and thrown out of the airlock. Don't try and tell me ordinary people would do that.'

He looked away, and from the eye she couldn't see gave Gendrik the wink. He felt rotten.  
'What was the name of that ship?' Gendrik asked her.

'HIMS Antorevan.' She said it like it was burned on her memory.

'Suluur,' Genrik asked him, 'we did shoot at an Interdictor once, didn't we? Do you remember her name?'

'Fantastic bloody coincidence, if it was.' Suluur said. 'Stranger things happen, though - to the turret.'

They were all happy to leave the vault.

'Typical.' Tarshkavik said. 'Blunder into a sealed, out of the way compartment on any other star destroyer, what would you find? A still, a spice farm, a sabacc pit maybe. On this ship, we find an illicit stash of proton torpedoes.'

'I'm sure we've got all those things as well.' Aldrem said.

Jhareylia leaned on him on the way. Another day, it would have had him bouncing off the ceiling. Now he was scared, more than anything else. Both of them were preoccupied, she too much so to notice Suluur and Hruthhal disappear, sprinting back to Port-4 for the fastest slicing job of their lives.

She should have been taking notes; it wasn't so often the Alliance got a good look inside imperial HTL turrets. She was in no state to. She did notice, irrelevantly, that it smelt like them. Aldrem sat her down in the com/scan chair. She wasn't sure what to believe was happening. Would they fake it - was it even possible? Did he have the sheer twistedness to manipulate her like that? She didn't think so.

'Rebels and minor powers are one thing, but you'd be amazed; we spend the vast majority of our time chasing down rogue units of the Imperial fleet, and hauling them back into line. Usually it's fairly easy; all we have to do is roll slightly, show them our kill scores.' Suluur said, as he was digging in the action logs.

'Speaking of which…' Aldrem said, using his own range taker to look down at the hull. 'I thought so. Two Interdictors.'

'I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere.' Suluur said, fingers dancing on the keypad. 'I don't think it's us, though, ours were the Ildomir and the Yelduro-Vartha. Where else would - I knew it.'

The data came flooding up on the main holodisplay in front of all of them.

'It was in a squadron tactical circular. Tector-class Indomitable intercepted the Antorevan, ordered her to stand down and receive auditors and inspectors from sector group command.' Aldrem read out, and interpreted. 'She must have been under suspicion already, especially if she was shaking down the convoys she was supposed to be escorting.'  
He didn't add, at least not out loud, 'and not giving his squadron commander his cut.'

'Antorevan refused, Indomitable opened fire, shooting to disable - one heavy turbolaser shot hit a grav well projector, dead centre, imploding it and overpenetrating to the reactor which, well, this calls it 'regrettable accident', I'd call it 'small supernova.'

Quietly, Jhareylia watched the ship which had been responsible for her parents' death rack and twist, then expand in a turbolaser-greenish tinted flare of white light as the energised implosion wrapped itself round the reactor, and rebounded.

'The Indomitable's one of ours - also part of 851 Squadron, that's why we heard about it. A crime was committed, detected, and punished. The Empire can look after its own, and the Alliance is so thinly spread, running as fast as it can to stand still, it can't. It wasn't the Rebellion who avenged your parents' murder. Remind me why you're with them again?' he said, feeling thoroughly rotten, and weirdly relieved at the same time.

It was enough of a shock, it robbed her of the presence of mind necessary to suspect a lie.

'Shall we go and talk to Commander Brenn, then? He's the navigator, this sort of thing defaults to him in the absence of anybody else. Let's go talk to him.'

Head reeling, she was in no position to say no. Her brain would pull itself together before long, and he intended to be there when it happened. For now - get it on paper, make it too late for her to turn back. Square it with his own conscience, which was about to have an almighty falling out with his libido anyway, later.

He did spare a second on the way, as she was being helped down the accessway, to talk to the com/scan tech.  
'So that's one outrageous lie told in the interests of truth and justice.' Suluur said.

'Sod truth and justice; in the interests of not handing her over to the pointy stick boys in Interrogation.' Aldrem replied. 'What did you actually do? That looked a bit too good to be that instant a creation.'

'Changed the name on the ship it happened to.'


	12. Chapter 12

The pair of B-wings emerged at the end of their first programmed jump. Both of them turned to kill velocity, scanning each other to see that they were in one piece, then searching out. This was supposed to be one of the rendezvous points, and their fighter comms were on rebel bands - helmet comms still on Imperial, so they could talk to each other out of character.

'Galactic Spirit, what a barrage. Are you sure they were shooting to miss?' Aron asked.

'I think so, just very, very well.' She replied. 'Time to start the spiel.'  
She took her helmet off, turned the B-wing's com unit to broadcast, began to call 'Any alliance forces, please respond, this is B-wing Test Flight Epsilon, help.'

The rendezvous point they had arrived at must have been a main fallback position. It was a more or less permanent problem for the Rebellion, and far worse for a junkheap like the B-wing whose nav systems were so limited; hit and run tactics required somewhere to run to. That meant staging areas, covered retreats, ambush points to deter pursuit, and, when they were lucky -no, she told herself, think opposite, when the rebels were very unlucky - confused, sprawling running battles that gave hyper capable fighters lots to do.

Long range sensors revealed small craft in the area, the outsystem of a barren star; a tramp freighter, apparently prospecting, and two mercenary fighter escorts. Supposedly. It was a fairly good cover, in the intelligence sense. Somewhere nearby with a precalculated route in would be cover, in the military sense.

One of the mercenary fighters broke off to investigate; they headed towards it, reactivating shields - just in case.

'Identify yourselves.' It said. Z-95; fractionally more agile than a B-wing, which wasn't hard. In common use the galaxy over, by innumerable local governments - hefty and robust, it had never done well in fleet service but had been a standard garrison fighter of the late Republic. Common enough in rebel hands.

'We're Imperial, we want to defect to the Alliance.' Aron said, quickly, before the first part made him do anything stupid.

'In B-wings?' the pilot didn't believe them.

'Captured, rebuilt, we were assigned to test them, we decided to see if they knew the way home.' Franjia said.

'We've said enough to doom us, you've said nothing. Are you Alliance or not?' Aron challenged him - powering up the B-wing's weapons.

'Easy, hotshot. This is a holding area. You wait here while we check you out. Where did you leave from?'

'Imperator-class, Black Prince.' Aron told him. 'Snap it up, they've probably got hunting parties out.'

The other fighter and the tramp - CorelliSpace, rounded triangular prism main body, bridge module on a stalk out ahead of it - turned towards them and moved to intercept.

'What do you reckon the drill is?' Franjia asked him, on the rebel channel.

'Well, they probably use that freighter as a shuttle.' He thought about how he would do it. 'I don't see them trusting anyone with nav coordinates straight off.'

'So you think we abandon ship, board the freighter, get blindfolded or something similarly melodramatic, and ferried to somewhere safe - hopefully - but wouldn't a litter of drifting ships be a dead giveaway?' she wondered.

'I suppose even fleet recon couldn't miss that.' Aron said. 'Whatever sort of checks you're making, freighter man, want to speed it up? We left with a flight group of Avengers chasing us.'

The freighter's crew heard all of this; they were intended to. The team on board consisted of four guards, an intelligence officer and the two crew, and they were arguing it out between them.

Mainly, there was an urgent call out to a watcher unit on Ghorn IV; their response was just coming in now- unanalysed, unfiltered crackly com intercept and fuzzy point-camera-at-sky home holovid footage. They heard the call to clear the line of fire; heard the intership between the Lancer and Black Prince, saw the unmistakable flares, visible even in broad planetary daylight, of turbolaser flak bursts.

What they were meant to hear. They also had, in a separate, self-erasing communication, an intelligence report from the ship in question.

'Identify yourselves.' The voice from the freighter - the pilot - said.

'We've already told you, we're on the run, and we'd like to do some more of that before they kriffing come after us - get us out of here, you can shoot us later.' Aron snapped at them.

'They mean personally.' Franjia told him. 'Flight Lieutenant Franjia Rahandravell, Starfighter Corps, Strike Wing attached ISD-721.'

'Oh. My previous comment still stands - get the hfredium out. Squadron Leader Aron Jandras, Imperial Starfleet attached Starfighter Corps, Strike Wing nominal 721.'

'Legitimate defectors or not, they'd be valuable captures.' The intelligence officer decided. 'Send for the frigate.'

'Clear on sensors?' the pilot asked his flight engineer, who checked - and they were not.

'Negative, negative, incoming, small capital - light or medium corvette, fast, ten, fifteen seconds.'  
That was only enough time to prepare themselves, raise shields and activate weapons; one triple laser turret. Nothing spectacular.

Stretched and slightly off-centre white flare; a poor hyper exit from a ship in a hurry, it was the Lancer-class Dubhei Targe, Kondracke's command. It swept the area on active scan.

'Renegades! Stand down - and we'll only disintegrate you once.' Kondracke sounded as if he was enjoying himself; he was certainly hamming it for all he was worth.

'Each?' Franjia called back, acidly, shunting energy to her own weapons. This had been one of the contingencies in the script.

Depending on how you looked at it, the Lancer's shape served it very well, or very badly. It pretty much enforced all round fire - the other side of the coin was that it couldn't concentrate on any one target. And it looked stupid.

'I suppose I can finally admit,' Franjia said, 'just how much those things remind me of a sex toy.'

'Considering what it's supposed to do to us, that's not an image I wanted.' Aron replied, turning and heading for it. Franjia followed.

The two Z-95 followed them in. Not the rebellion's best, not its worst, they were tour-expired main line pilots; in theory, this was their spell of soft duty, away from a front line attack unit to rest and recover before being thrown back into the thick of it.

Attacking an antifighter frigate was not their idea of fun. Doing anything involving combat in a B-wing wasn't exactly Aron's and Franjia's.

'Think TIE fighter.' She told him. 'The firepower that thing puts out, you can't afford to get hit. Jink, stunt, don't be afraid to break off and run for it.'

'Is that what you did when you were back in TIEs?' he couldn't resist asking her. Both the Alliance pilots noticed that, banter aside, the two B-wings were coming in moderately far apart, close enough for mutual support, far enough not to crowd each other, jammers active, sensors picking out point targets, in slow, deceptive weave.

'Stang yes. I survived. The really clever part is managing to make it not look like you're running away…95's, are you loaded?'

'Affirmative, flight lieutenant.' One of them said, in a senior officer sounding voice.

'Good,' Aron said, blandly ignoring the tone, 'one of you follow each of us in - that ship did get fairly well shot up. Do you suppose it still has any blind spots?'

'Mirannon didn't get to it, so probably. We're not going to take it down.' Franjia said, and spectacularly optimistically at that. 'Our best option is to pick off it's com antenna, so at least it can't report which way we run.'

'Right.' Aron acknowledged. 'I'll lead in.'

So slow, so inexorably slow; Aron wanted to get out and walk, it would be faster. 'Headhunters, start lobbing your concussions at the turrets.' At least it would force the Lancer to waste time shooting them down.

'You refuse the order of the Empire? Then DIE!' Kondracke shouted, all the Lancer's guns that could bear opened fire on Aron. If we ever get back, Aron thought I'm going to recommend him for psych-eval.

What's even worse is that the rebels don't seem to get it. I mean, he's shooting at me, and I can see the silly side. Humourless bastards.

Aron surged the B-wing into a diving right - hand spiral, aiming under the Lancer. He was hoping that even if he couldn't dodge the fire control systems, at least he could fake out the gunners. Zigzagging, twisting and weaving to draw their fire away from Franjia's attack run, and hopefully not get killed himself - he was, when it came down to it, a better pilot than she was, and she was a better shot. That meant she got the easy job.

B-wings didn't dodge. Not well, anyway. The quad-lasers spat green fire at them, and reflexively he twisted in his seat, trying to make himself a smaller target. The cockpit was well away from the centre of mass, so the ejectors probably would have time to function. That was pretty much the only comfort.

The Lancer seemed to be having trouble with it's fire control systems. Twenty quads, eight could reach Aron, three of them were empty sockets; for a second he wondered why he wasn't dead, a glance aft - they were tracking him, theoretically perfect, but it was pure ballistic prediction.

None of the advanced modes, like calculating and coordinating to flood his manoeuvre envelope; Kondracke's gone and left them unmanned, hasn't he? Aron thought. They weren't even trying to predict what he would do next. They could still kill him if he was dumb enough to let them.

The rebels seemed to be flinching, hanging shy of the stream of green light pouring out of the Lancer; small wonder. One of them shot off a missile, the turret flicked round on to it. Franjia rolled to bear on the turret and sent a stream of autoblaster fire though the shield gap; the missile warhead detonated, Aron used the cover of the flash to reverse course and head for the dorsal mounted antenna, the ship rocked as the turret blew up.

Not before the last of it's stream of shot had followed on to the evading Z-95. Shields blown out, shunted aft, blown out again, engines crippled; the pilot ejected before the fighter shook itself to pieces.

It didn't save him; one of the other turrets caught him and turned him into a luminous smear.

So much for plan A, Aron realised; fly the B-wing into the com antenna, eject before impact. Ouch, Franjia thought; that would be a public-display atrocity, then. To make this look right, he has to be prepared to do the same to us.

Vicious but dumb was what the script called for, and he delivered on the second half of that; the guns spurted bolts - what some of the bomber crews called 'hard rain' - at her, two glancing shield hits, then switched back to following Aron.

Her target-warning was howling, but no actual incoming, she ignored it; doubled shields forward, set the guns for simultaneous fire.

The surviving '95 had backed off, locked on from relatively long range and rippled all its missiles, one at each available turret; they switched into self-protection mode long enough for her to get a good, steady shot.

The heavy laser, twin autoblasters, triple ion cannon pounded into the shields around the com antenna; it had been shot off in the initial Rebel rocket attack, the dorsal aft generator crippled, and it was now covered by stretching the main dorsal midships shield emitter's field over the area. It was no easier to knock down - probably beyond fighter energy cannon anyway- but it was possible to get a local burn through.

The shield flared, crackled, became patchy. The Lancer's cannon, still pulsing out their bolts, swung off him on to her, she held steady on target as the streams converged on her. Front shields fraying, split second to weigh the odds, break away- she shut down weapon charge, dumped it into stabilising the shielding, twisted away in an asymmetric corkscrew.

They turned back to track Aron as he swung in to finish the job, started shooting- and she curved back in again, shifted from shields to weapons, hammered it again; that was enough. The shield gapped and blistered long enough for a stream of blaster shot to leak through, the com antenna shattered, the guns turned back to her and she ran for it, all shields aft, dancing and twisting. Aron pulled away to join her.

'I've changed my mind.' She said, on private com. 'Let's go back to the Empire.'

'Just when we were having fun?' he said, sardonically.

'It's the worst job in the book, defence suppression. Turning out to be good at it is write-your-will time- the tour survival rate's only about ten percent. I sure as sunspots don't want to do it for the Alliance-'

'Galactic Spirit. I should have realised I was tempting fate.' She said, as the slightly larger, slightly more ridiculous shape of a Nebulon-B wearing an Alliance transponder emerged from brilliant white flare.

'It's going to tear the Lancer apart.' Aron realised what she meant. 'Unless there's a friendly fire hazard in the way?'

'You lead, I'll cover.' Stabilise shields and weapons, and back in again. This time, they were simply trying not to be hit. Very close, high aspect, lots of twisting, unpredictable moves.

If there had been men in those turrets, gunners to second guess them and take the processing burden of judgement away from the computers, they would have been toasted on the first attack run.

For a moment Aron thought of flying in front of the bridge and making rude gestures at Kondracke, try to make sure he took the hint; a sure way to get a laser bolt in the face. He settled for hosing down the ship's shields with ion and blaster fire, and weaving to avoid being hit. Franjia did the same- pressed in to close range and swarmed all over it. It seemed to be working; the rebel frigate was holding its fire. Neither of them were sure if Kondracke actually deserved that much luck.

Dubhei Targe rolled to bring fresh guns to bear, sent a stream of fire after the freighter; emerald sparks flew off it, it accelerated out of the way and moved to hide behind the Nebulon.

The lancer turned to accelerate away; that left Franjia and Aron with the choice of thrusting after it to keep up - predictably - or breaking off. Hoping Kondracke had the sense to hyper out, they turned away, opening a gap between them with the total acceleration of forty-seven hundred g. Almost enough to feel safe.

The Nebulon sent a relative handful of LTL shots after the Lancer; too late.

'You may win this one, traitor scum, but we'll find you.' Kondracke was still ranting, some quirk in the signal processing software caused his words to Doppler shift as the frigate made for light speed, trailing off in basso-profundo.

'Nebulon frigate,' Aron called to it, sounding and feeling tired as the adrenalin started to drain away, 'permission to land?'

'Test flight Epsilon, this is Chandrillia Rose Actual; the suggestion has been made that we should turn you down, your brand of madness may be contagious.'

'All right, plan C, where's the nearest Hutt arms dealer?' Franjia said, over open channel, to Aron; they intercepted it.

'We can use maniacs like you.' The Chandrillia Rose's captain responded. 'You are number one on approach.'

As they cancelled vector and moved towards the Nebulon, Aron private-channelled across, 'So that much of the plan worked, at least.'

'Yes, and that was supposed to be the easy part.' Franjia replied. 'Scramble your helmet com, they'll inspect it.'

'Doing it now.' He did; they were on official channels until they touched down.

The B-wing landed on it's side; crazy way of doing things, they both thought. The side fins folded in and the cockpit rotated. Aron's fins worked, the cockpit didn't.

He hated Nebulons on principle, chiefly that they were damned difficult to land on. There had been so little manoeuvring room, even when he had been riding a TIE off one, that he had started taking a gas gun with him - hand held EVA thruster.

The principle was, it gave him the option of ejecting and space-walking home. He wished he had it now. It was very tempting.

'Tractor beaming you in now.' The ship com'd to him.

'Negative, I'll bring this junker in myself.'

That would have been disastrous. The compensators would have reacted to the tractor beam as if it was being brought in sideways, would have tried to rotate into an upright position. At the least, it would give him a headache - slam the cockpit off the hangar ceiling. At worst, boom.

There was virtually no room within the hangar bay; two half- squadrons, X's and Y's, sat parked there. Coming in damaged, effectively - he came in dead slow, rolled to line up, coming in on the fighter's side, crossed his toes, hit the edge of the frigate's relative- inertials and the B-wing nearly kicked itself out of his hands.

He had to wrestle it down on to the flight deck, steering jets flaring, threatening to twist itself out of control; there was a bang and a molten- insulation smell from behind him.

No room for this, he thought - more of a glandular scream - he bounced the B-wing off the deck, it skidded and came up trapped against the nose of a pair of X-wings.

The cockpit opened, he tumbled out on to the deck, landing on his shoulder. He got up, rubbing it, took his helmet off with the other hand, threw it at the B-wing, then started kicking the grounded fighter.

'Useless piece of crap.' Kick. 'Slow, unreliable, worthless junk.' Kick.

There was a squad of Rebel infantry, civilian blaster rifles and Alderaanian- pattern uniforms standing there looking at him; there were a couple of pilots too, one of them looking annoyed. It must have been his X-wing Aron had landed on.

Franjia's B-wing arrived with fewer problems. She touched down, vaulted out.

'You could treat it with a bit more respect. They got us here, after all.' She advised him. 'At the most, spit on it.'

The infantry were glaring at them, one of the pilots was laughing at the other one.

One of the infantry came forwards; a rank insignia neither of them recognised. He seemed to be an officer, from the attitude; sandy hair, pockmarked face like grit had been blasted into it, and it probably had.

'Your sidearms.' He held out a hand. The troopers behind him looked menacing. They were surprisingly good at it. They weren't heavy, not physically impressive, but they looked as if they held life very cheap indeed.

'What for?' Aron asked.

'So you can't shoot him, I expect.' Franjia said, unclipping the holster from her vac suit.

'That's daft. If I wanted to do something like that I'd have strafed the hangar bay. Scrap these-' he waved an arm at the fighters, 'their power cells and ordnance cooking off could be enough to break a Nebulon's back.'

'As twistedly useful an idea as that is, we should probably hand over your gun and start with "hello."' She gave him her gun, took off her helmet. One of the rebel pilots wolf-whistled.

'I think I might just go and do that.' she said turning back towards the B-wing.

'Come with me.' The rebel infantryman ordered.

They were led out of the bay, past a workshop - the air smelt of metal filings; did they have to hand-craft their own replacement parts? Interesting.

Nebulon-B's actually did have an inside, although it often looked otherwise, as small as they were. Down three levels, left two corridors, a couple of heads poked out of doorways to look at them in passing.

Eventually, they were led into a chamber that seemed to be some kind of ready room; it reminded Aron of a doctor's waiting room.

'What is this?' Aron asked the one man already there. The squad of troops and the two pilots, as well as a ship's officer, filed into the room behind them.

'Debriefing.' The man already there, in basically civilian clothes - from somewhere deeply unfashionable on the outer rim - said, in a grey, nondescript voice. Instantly both the pilots' hackles went up.

'What the smenge? You don't trust us?' Aron snapped.

'Aron,' Franjia said to him, 'we've put our lives in these people's hands. There probably will be a time to start screaming at them, but I doubt if this is it.'

'We have very little on you.' The grey-voiced man said, as if nothing had been said.

'Small wonder; if you tried to assemble a file on everyone in the Starfleet, you'd need more data pushers than you have infantry.' Franjia pointed out, looking at them, trying to decide who the head man was. Probably one of the pilots, by the vibe.

'And they might do you more good.' Aron added. 'Look; we came to join the Alliance. Join. So why are you treating us more like prisoners of war?'

'We do have a file on the ship you claim to come from.' The greyish interrogator said. 'The same ship that eliminated a frigate division and a local force fighter wing.'

'What's your score?' Franjia turned round to what looked like the senior of the two Rebel pilots.

'Fourteen.' The man said. He was shortish - meter seventy - dark haired, pale skinned.

'Thirty-four. Fifteen rebel and nineteen renegade Imperial. We're a-' she realised where she was going with that, 'we're from a theatre fleet unit, we see more of the Empire than most.  
'The so-called loyal opposition, the local powers with grudges, the power-crazed within our own ranks, the criminals and shysters and arrogant upper-class shits that the New Order hasn't got around to purging yet- or got bought off by…turning your back on that, how much comes down to reason and how much to revulsion?' she asked, angrily, rhetorically.

'We quit,' Aron said, 'because of what was going to happen. We were elsewhere at the time, but I know the Black Prince took that fast frigate more or less intact, with something around two thousand prisoners.'

'How?' the Rebel naval officer asked.

'Burnt her shielding off with LTL fire, kept her evading long enough for a transport wing to ionise and board. The crew were turned over to the locals, who plan a mass public execution. The Captain ranted about it in the alpha wardroom, the senior officers told the juniors - and so on down to the disposables like us.' Franjia smiled a ghoulish smile.

'Mass public execution?' The pilots, the naval and the intelligence officer looked at each other, assessing, giving their opinions by expression. The pilots believed it instantly. The intelligence officer was more sceptical.

'One of the reasons Captain Lennart never rose any higher is because he has a bad habit of telling the truth, especially when he's annoyed. In furor veritas.' Franjia continued. It was actually more or less true.

'He viewed it…for complicated reasons, he viewed it as a deliberate attempt to marginalise the ship, and have the sector fleet do things their own way. He had plans for comprehensive brainripping and follow up strikes; we had already been briefed on some of them. Then Sector threw us - sorry, him - out, seized your people, and basically plan to put them through blenders.'

She was being deliberately, brutally flippant, and it had the desired effect. The intel type was still uncertain, but the naval officer and the pilots thought otherwise.

One of them did remember his duty well enough to say 'You don't seem very- anti.'

'The Empire, I don't regret leaving behind- but Black Prince, maybe. She was basically a happy ship, and there are few of those on any side.' Aron decided to say.

'The other side of that - the easier it actually is to get away from, the less you need to. Usually. That was just sick, though. A fair chance is one thing. Well, for a certain value of fair anyway.'

'A fair chance? You call what the Empire does fair?' the naval officer snarled.

'For a given, sneak up on them and shoot them in the back before they see you coming, value of 'fair' - where does your Captain Lennart come from?' the more senior of the two Rebel pilots asked. Perception was part of the game, too.

'He's old Republic fleet, joined a few years after Naboo I think.' Aron said. 'Look - I'm a hunter, not a butcher. It is relative, I can stomach one but not the other, and aren't you going to do anything about it?'

The senior pilot and the ship's officer left; the interrogator, the junior pilot with the bent-nosed X-wing, and the troopers, and the two Imperials still in TIE flight suits. Routine interrogation, names, dates, places, technicalities.

Aron's service career was fairly straightforward; young swoop ganger from Coruscant, enlisted one step ahead of the planetary police, did well enough at the Academy to go to fleet rather than garrison duty. A convoy-escort Nebulon-B, then an assault ship, then flight command, then shifted to an Imperator-I, moved up to Interceptors, then transferred to the Black Prince as a squadron commander. Most of Aron's score was pirates and local government rogues.

Franji's was slightly more tortured. Policewoman, air branch, Chazwa- Aron nearly jumped out of his suit at that. Hovers and skimmers mainly, observation and rescue work. Compulsorily transferred to the militia during a period of piracy, she had been among the group that had intercepted a major pirate attack - and been drafted into the Starfleet fighter corps for her pains. Fighters, then TIE bombers off a Venator, then the frankly strange Int/Xt- and at that point she was questioned primarily by Aron.

'The Xt has a weird reputation. Do they live up to it?'

'What's an Xt?' the rebel pilot - Comran M'lanth - asked.

'Squint Special.' Franjia replied. 'It must have seemed like a good idea at the time- maximum possible firepower; it retains the chin guns the standard Interceptor loses; and adds two more laser cannon in each wing hub.'

The Rebel pilot's jaw dropped. 'It does what?'

'Flies very, very badly. There was a reason they drafted bomber pilots to them. Ten guns sounds wonderful - the idea was to hit hard enough to knock out things like YT's, shuttles and transports quickly and neatly. Six extra guns draining the power banks- or carrying their own capacitors, in addition to the weight of the weapon, and six more guns' worth of waste heat, on a fighter with too small a wing radiator area to begin with.'

'It didn't work?' Aron asked.

'Like skis on an AT-AT. By the time they stripped the guns and capacitors down to save weight, you only had eight, maybe nine shots before the capacitors ran dry or the barrels melted, take your pick. It was the wrong spaceframe for the job; a version based on the Starwing hull would be more effective.'

Basically, it dissolved into three pilots talking shop. The little grey man took notes on both sides.

'OK, but if I get anything - any fighte r- in the killing position, above, behind and close, one or two shots and its dead anyway and your shields don't do you any good. They might count for something against high tangent snapshots when you can't get a consistent sequence of hits, or against light PD, but the whole idea is not to get shot.' Aron was ranting.

'Without the protection of a decent layer of shields, the chances of getting killed before you learn not to get shot-' Comran said.

'I don't understand how you expect to win a war on the basis of on the job training.' Franjia interrupted him.

'What about getting your shot in first? Past about Interceptor, and I reckon the A-wing goes too far, you are better off with shields to hold the thing together, because something that agile is too twitchy to be a good gun platform.'

'Which side are you on, anyway?' Aron asked her, mostly in jest.

'The side of superior firepower, of course.'

'On many things you seem to be, in fact, broadly in agreement.' The little grey man said; impossible to tell if he approved or disapproved.

'Well, it is supposed to be a civil war. You expect the sides to have nothing in common?' Aron said, still too flippant.

The squad leader clenched his fist and stepped forward, about to punch Aron; Comran stopped him.

'There's no call for that, Lieutenant.'

'Perhaps there is.' Greyface said. 'Loyalties. I need to know more about your loyalties.'

'Well,' Franjia said, openly sneering at him, 'you qualify as an outright mirror image.'

'I have not had you tortured.'

'The most efficient seldom do.' Franjia said. 'They erode their way to the truth, that way they find it in fewer pieces when they get there. All right; I admit it. I'm human, sometimes conscience and pragmatism trip over each other, and loyalty is a stranger beast than most people like to think.'

'We believe that the cause of the Alliance is just. A search for justice is not as powerful a motive as we would want.' The interrogator said.

'Forces within the empire; old guard and new men, radicals and moderates - some leave the Imperial armed forces and some are ejected. Centrifugal forces.'

'No, no, linear forces, I'm a third dan master of the Cult of Thrust.' Aron pushed his wit a shade too far, and then turned serious. 'Why is it so bloody hard for you to accept that you might be right? There weren't exactly an abundance of Rebel recruitment offices on Coruscant. Now I find myself on a ship loose enough to make a getaway from, with a hyperspace capable fighter that probably knows the way, and a messy atrocity in progress to turn my back on. Why don't you think that adds up?'

'Have you ever considered defecting to the Empire?' Franjia asked him. Eyebrows shot up around the room.

'As an academic possibility.' The interrogator replied.

'Why didn't it add up for you?' she said, innocent sounding.

'You plan to stand my reasoning on its head?'

'Basically. Why don't you think that your reasons to belong to the Alliance and not to the Empire are enough?'

'Because I have yet to be convinced that they are also your reasons.' The grey man said. 'You put up with the Empire and served it loyally this far, did you not?'

'Actually, as a regional fleet unit, and an ex-cop, cynicism is part of the territory.' Franjia answered. 'You get to be familiar with the brutalities that local forces perpetrate. In fact, you recognise them as exactly the same sort of bloody-minded stupidity that tore the Republic apart.' The rebels looked unfriendly upon her.

'I thought being part of the loyal opposition was enough; that things were no worse than they would be otherwise, and perhaps a little better. Then you come face to face with a genuine, full-blooded psychotic, and the shock of realising that they believe that you, in fact, are on their side. That they expect you to hear and obey, as if nothing was wrong.  
That their sense of what is and isn't right is so far out of touch that they don't understand why people are shocked by them any more - you expect to find that huddled in the gutter, not in power.'

The Alliance naval lieutenant re-entered the room. 'Would you care to prove your loyalty to the Alliance?' he asked, bluntly. The grey faced spy glared at him; the first sign of real emotion he had displayed.

'Depends whether our propaganda people are right about your initiation rites.' Aron replied.

'Aron, think about it. We refuse, at best we get to spend the rest of our lives as prisoners of war.' Franjia said.

Comran couldn't help it. 'And at worst?'

'Spend the rest of our lives in 'debriefing'. I don't know who you, personally, would be prepared to kill to avoid that fate, but-'

'So what's the mission?' Aron asked. 'Let me guess. Recon run?'

'Correct.'

With suitable destruct charges bolted under the ejector seat, Franjia guessed. 'Provided you don't make us fly it in B-wings.'


	13. Chapter 13

Nearly thirty-seven thousand crew, that worked out at a shade over four thousand midshipmen or better, ten thousand petty and warrant officers. Four thousand officers needed a lot of wardroom space. There was enough internal space and to spare on a Star Destroyer, but traditions died hard.

A wardroom was combination living room, dining room, lounge and library space, dating back to when ships were too small to give the officers any private space beyond a cot and a footlocker. The Republic fleet had been more expansive about these things, but making officers associate socially with each other had struck the Starfleet as good sense.

Four decks down and two compartments aft, the main bridge officers' wardroom was busy. Dinner, and much talking of shop.

'As far as I'm concerned, the sector fleet are part of the problem.' Brenn was pausing between mouthfuls. 'Not Rebel, I wouldn't go that far, but definitely independent. Or at least - not trying very hard.'

'Their cryptographic security isn't very good either.' Rythanor said. 'Traffic flow patterns are- strange. A lot of silent substations, too much coming and going from central command. That has advantages; they're overworked, they get sloppy. We're good, but we're not that good. If we can break in, the Alliance can- and the Ubiqtorate could blow in and out like a summer breeze. Probably even the ISB might manage to achieve something.'

The Starfleet always had a closer relationship with the substantially more competent Imperial Intelligence than it had with the enthusiastic amateurs of the Imperial Security Bureau; closer, but nobody, possibly not even themselves, had a comfortable relationship with the Men In Visible.

Black Prince, like all Imperator-class, was simply too obvious for intelligence work. Following up on information revealed and handing over prisoners taken was about it, and they would have welcomed a little professional advice now.

'Winter typhoon, more like.' One of the pit officers, com watch team supervisor Lieutenant Ondrath Ntevi, said. 'I couldn't tell you which way they're going to jump.

One thing, they have been interested in us. Forty, fifty requests for information to regional command, theatre fleet, Central Command, you name it.'

'That should keep them usefully baffled for a couple of years.' Brenn said. If there was a place for glib facetiousness on an Imperial warship, the wardroom was it.

'Well, it's kept us baffled for the best part of two decades.' Rythanor said.

'Sir, is there any particular reason we've sometimes had to break through fleet security to get our own mail?' Ntevi asked.

'That's right, you don't know the story, do you?'

'Story? I thought we were trailing a multiplex of gibberish. If there's a core of sense in there, I'd like to hear it too.' Rythanor asked.

'Boiled down to the bare essentials,' Brenn grinned, 'Black Prince commissioned late. And early, technically. She was held up in construction, region command misestimated the actual completion date, and…there was no formation for us to fit in to. We were assigned to an old Operational Fleet, 149, which had already ceased to exist when it was folded into Qiilura Sector Fleet- the original commission, already filled by another temporary assignment. We were posted to a formation that didn't exist yet- Shiwal Sector Fleet- when we completed working up earlier than the second due date. At this point we veer into, well, I trust I'm among friends here…outright fraud.'

'Organisational screwups are one thing- taking deliberate advantage of them, how?' Ntevi asked, smiling in bafflement.

'The Exec of the plankowner crew. He appealed to a third command, the Tingel Approaches subCommand that eventually turned into Azure Hammer, a long, deceptively straightforward set of requests, which kept getting continually amended and clarified, as per procedure. Which- and remember we're still part of 149, and chain of command procedure meant we could effectively use their letterhead- two other commands got dragged into the mess, arguing over us. What's it called, Pseudo? Jublo? The art of using an opponent's strength against them- it works on paperwork too.  
'Basically, we managed to start a faction fight over us, get them wrestling with each other while this ship sort of…slipped between the cracks, acting and drawing pay, fuel, spares and stores on one or other- or several- temporary authorisations. At one point we were drawing pay and spares for a Shockwave with the same name- In Standard, not Basic- which was, well, interestingly inappropriate.

'We had to bank the excess as capital and draw interest, horse trade the bits that were too dangerous to sell off back to the Starfleet- beginning a long tradition of improvising, modifying, making do. No-one with the specific oversight to stop us.  
'We were the lead ship against, and claimed the kill credit for, the CSS Moderniser- a separatist remnant battlewagon. The captain was old Republic navy - this was two years after Second Coruscant; pretty much everyone senior was - and not a natural Imperial.  
'He resigned his commission and retired to the Rim, he's probably a Rebel now. That was what triggered the investigation, in the end, but to all practical purposes the exec was running the ship, and we were moving from zone to zone pretty much at will - looking for more war.

'Distinction, glory, advancement. We were a crack ship; worth arguing over.

'It came to an end when Captain Dodonna resigned and three alternative captains turned up over the next month. Live by the improv, die by the improv. Three separate commands claiming the right to assign and promote- or demote. It ended up at a full scale court of inquiry.  
'Now, I was a raw junior lieutenant at the time, just too late to defend the Republic, still so wet behind the ears my helmet kept sliding off; I only worked out the details much later.  
'The papers still exist, somewhere. The last I heard, the court records were a standard training document for the ISB's fraud squads.

'The Starfleet dealt with the ship by assigning us to a higher echelon force on a permanent basis- the only way to tidy up all the counter-claims, and exactly what we wanted in the first place.'

Brenn gestured at the squadron shield on the wardroom wall; the winged mace of 851 Destroyer Squadron.

'One City - Urbanus - class cruiser, two Allegiance and two Shockwave heavies, three Tector, six Imperator including us, three old Venator. The squadron has two distinctions; we have never deployed all in one place at one time, and we have never sent a man to any of the strategic pursuit squadrons. Three, if you include never submitting a dishonest fitness report.'

'Sir, why is that so much of a distinction?' Ntevi asked. 'Surely-'

'Everyone screws up. Gets sloppy, takes shortcuts, fails in courtesy to a brother officer-'

Someone muttered 'Mirannon'.

'Precisely.' Brenn said. 'Engineer-Commander Mirannon is a perfect - no, spectacular- example. Professionally, he's a very competent officer. Personally, he's rude, abrupt, abrasive, pushy, ungentlemanlike and a chronic practical joker and encourager of same. I'm not saying that just because I like the man.'

'According to our store returns,' Wathavrah said, 'he has been stockpiling torpedoes. Either he's planning to go into the blasting business for himself, or he has one spectacular trick planned.'

'Don't worry, the authorisations actually exist.' Brenn said. 'First Principle of Bureaucratic Warfare; do it right, somewhere. Then lie about it all you want, once you've established the ability to prove it's the other guy's fault. In theory we have them to replenish other ships. Next time we lose a turret,' the navigator said it as if it was inevitable, 'his plan is to emergency fit torpedo tubes in place of the flank LTL's, and double them up- to preserve the ship's effective firepower.  
'Of course, when we get the turret replaced, the tubes won't go away. Net result, we acquire a large addition to our long range and bombardment firepower. As an academic exercise, for all of you, picture the charge sheet.'

'I knew he wasn't mad enough to do something like that without covering himself, but he comes damnably close.' Wathavrah said. 'When was he planning to inform the relevant department of this?'

'Before or after you unload- three Category One, two Category Two and four Category Three offences?- on him?' Rythanor asked.

'None of which will happen.' Brenn explained. 'He will be reprimanded, which will balance out against the commendation for putting the ship back together after being damaged. Punishment will be administrative and internal. His fitrep will say things like "brilliant but unstable" and "achieves results at the expense of proper procedure." Meaning we hold on to him.'

'You can break a man's career with an honest fitrep. The slight screwups, the mistakes you make while learning to do the job, the routine stress of sitting on a stellar power level reactor and waiting for it to burp, the enemy trying to kill you and command trying to get you killed - what's perfection?  
'So - overstating it is part of the game. Expectations shift. We exaggerate, regional command knows we exaggerate, both sides know what they really mean. "Outstanding" translates to "Can find his own ass better than 50% of the time, but only if allowed to use both hands." We like to tell as much of the truth as the individuals involved can stand.'

'In the interest of keeping them still standing.' Wathavrah said. 'If I punished all my people for uniform and conduct infractions, as severely as the book says - we'd end up parking the ship on Kessel, and could the last one out turn the lights off? What good would that do anyone? There has to be some discretion.'

'Shandon, the last all up drill, how did your gun crews do?' Brenn asked.

'We benchmarked out at six point eight.' The gunnery officer reported. 'In accordance with standing orders.'

'Without the minor hiccups, how would you have done?'

'Eight point nine five.' Rythanor admitted.

'Which is in violation of squadron standing orders, because we are supposed to pick up on the minor details like non-standard uniform, holoposters in the turret- to keep the benchmark below seven. The screening threshold.' Brenn said.

'I don't understand.' Ntevi said.

'Above that benchmark, you become eligible for transfer to strategic forces, like the Death Squadron, like the Death Star- picture a situation where you have to live up to the pack of lies on your fitness report.' Brenn said, smiling like a wolf.

'Ouch…' Ntevi realised.

'Their real performance is nowhere near as good as the fleet likes to think. They're all far too busy simulating performance to have any time for the real thing. The only way they can keep their jobs, or their lives with the Dark Lord involved, is to do it exactly by the book. No initiative. No ability to deviate from the plan, react to the unpredictable. If you want to turn into a hollow shell of your former self, running scared of your own command structure every nanosecond of the day, join the waiting list for the Executor. If you actually want to fight for the Empire, stay put.'

All of them made the appropriate deduction for squadron pride and personal envy.

'The loose end. The first exec. Executed?' Ntevi asked.

'No; it was hard to prove that a ship with over forty merchant captures and ten warship kills including a medium cruiser was acting against the interests of the Empire. At least, it was hard then; I dare say it could be managed now. The court busted him back to Lieutenant, and a staff job. Took him eight years to work his way back to a destroyer command.'

'So what happens next?' Wathavrah asked. 'Now that we have a plant in the alliance.'

'Who told you that?' Brenn shouted at him.

'Two fighter pilots go missing, and their rooms aren't torn apart for evidence, their comrades aren't interrogated to within an inch of their lives, their places aren't filled - no internal security investigation worth dreck, in fact. That smells of their being sent.'

'You may be on to something. Don't compromise them. Now,' Brenn said, 'we wait for the Rebs to take the bait.'

It was a slightly augmented fighter squadron that left the Chandrillia Rose.

The apparently junior Rebel pilot who had watched them undergo debriefing turned out to be more senior than he looked, and not too bad an actor. Squadron Leader M'Lanth's X-wing leading, and both Y-wing flight leaders had traded up to the B-wings. In Aron and Franjia's opinion, only very slightly augmented.

They flew a formation that made no sense, except under the circumstances. The rebel bomb half-squadron had all moved up a place; the flight leaders taking B-wings, their wingmen taking their fighters- and the last pair of Y-wings were left for their 'new comrades'.

Physically, they were leading, where the rebels could watch them.

Just before takeoff, one of the flight leaders- what was it with these people? She hadn't seen a single one who would have looked out of place in an Imperial uniform. Same names, same manners, same jokes, those of them that had any sense of humour at all. Their personnel breakdown was virtually the same as the racist, sexist Imperial fleet. That worried her, to an extent.

'So how do these things fly, then?' the flight leader- Wordell Grannic- had asked Aron.

'It's one of yours, you don't know?'

'Central command squadrons get ships like that, maybe. One or two squadrons in a subzonal command, ten or twenty in a sector maybe; we wouldn't even see one in a green star.'

'Don't you at least have sim time to go on?' Aron asked.

'On a frigate? We don't have the facilities for that.' Wordell said, baffled.

Both the imperial pilots kept a straight face only with effort. 'Well, electronic cockpit time isn't all it's cracked up to be.' Aron said.

'It's a bomber.' Franjia said. 'Slow, well armed and good fire control. Fly like you expect people to get out of your way.'

'You sure as stang can't.' Aron muttered.

Well, they were in the air now, and both of them meandering loose around the sky on their way to the programmed jump point. M'Lanth was fairly competent; he had the wit to realise that four of his pilots were new to their craft, and give them a little time to get used to them. And their astromechs. RO2-ZB1 was riding behind Aron, RF2K-RL3 with Franjia; ten other droids in the unit, the odds that at least one of them was downloading to Imperial Intelligence- whether it knew it or not- better than forty percent.

Both of the astromechs had probably been briefed to prevent any re-defection attempt. Triple agents.

The Imperial pilots were, nonetheless, enjoying themselves. The rebels were short of sims, short of fuel and parts to allow their fighters to accumulate real wear and tear; fifty, sixty flight hours was normal.

Between patrol and hunter operations, Aron and Franjia both had well over two thousand. They reacted more quickly, flew more precisely and took their craft much closer to the edge, and shot a lot straighter. Mock combat, rolling round each other, Aron got killing positions on all of his flight, one after the other, pop, pop, pop. Franjia preferred distance, long range, high aspect fire; just not quite where they were expecting, just out of the crosshairs, ducking past every time.

Comran knew his business; he might be able to take on one of them, but not both. 'If you can keep that up, I'm glad you're on our side. What do you normally fly?' he asked them.

'Starwings. And how I wish I'd brought mine with me.' Franjia said; her astromech beeped indignantly. 'No, Raf-Tookie, you don't make up for the five hundred 'g' this clunker's short of.'

'You don't rate the Y-wing?' Grannic said.

'Is this really the time and place for a discussion of Imperial methodology?'

'Before a fight, dodgy - but a lot better than during or after.' Aron said.

'The TIE Bomber goes back to the clone wars. It was designed for close quarters brawls; massive casualties inevitable, from friendly and random as much as targeted fire. The only way to minimise your losses is to degrade the enemy faster than he does you. The design shows that- heavy payload, good electronics, medium manoeuvrability and poor straight line thrust and damage tolerance.  
'The Y-wing's a completely different type- a fighter-bomber, designed for open, running combat, faster, more agile- but not by much. It's a step in the right direction, for the Alliance. Only a short one, but better than nothing.' Franjia gave her opinion.

'Intel doesn't trust you.' M'Lanth said.

'Not surprised. I wouldn't like us, if I were him.' Aron said.

'If he wasn't suspicious, he wouldn't be doing his job.' Franjia said. 'He'll learn.' Inwardly, she was calculating her probable lifespan as an Alliance pilot. It was not a comfortable line of thought.

Lady Lyria Tellick had been a senatorial aide at one point; she knew politics, and she loathed Palpatine and his empire.

Azirrn, she had never really dared to seriously believe in a future for them together; there were no broken dreams grinding against each other, at least it had been a clean amputation.

Was she really a rebel? Lyria Tellick, Alliance agent in place? Probably. That could have carried her here by stranger, although possibly more honest, routes.

M'Lanth announced the hypershift; the fourteen leapt into hyperspace, ran their way down through the energies and up through the velocities, heading for Ghorn III. Franjia felt no reluctance about shooting at the sector forces - apart from the practicalities of doing it in a Y-wing. They might easily have ended up doing that anyway. Aron was feeling grumpy enough to attack pretty much anybody. Suicide missions had never agreed with him.

The exit was planned very close to the planet; close enough that the defences could get a bow shock and warning off them, so close that they would be deploying inside any likely screen. Hopefully, close enough that they could be in and out without having to engage.

Aron doubted it. He had only been introduced to the fine art of operational planning, but all his instincts were against this.

The actual plan was for four pairs, Y's and B's, flying a low, fast patrol route, down on the deck using the planet as cover, two flights of X keeping the TIE's off their backs. Sensible as far as it went, but he didn't agree with making it a squadron operation at all. Too much to sneak in, too little to blast their way. Better, if they needs must use what they had to hand, to send a smaller force- a flight of Y's, fake transponders as some local force defence unit, go by bluff.

That was only part of the problem. It wasn't that he had never questioned his own loyalties; just that he loved flying, and had allowed himself to become hardened to the price of the job. Fast fighters tended to have guns strapped to them.

Basically, he was on the imperial side because he had been born there. Something about the Rebel cause did appeal; independence, freedom, being on the wrong side of the law. Only a badly damaged society would cling to values like Order, Stability, Conformity. Then again, it was starting to look as if the Alliance had more than a few problems of it's own.

I'm using myself as a test case, he thought. If this lot are anything to go by, I could go far as a freedom fighter - if they can convince me, or seduce me with a command of my own, we'll just have to see, won't we?

Emergence; and a quick passive scan revealed a merciful absence of destroyers. The Golan was still there; with them between it and the planet, all it could do was scramble the alert flight. Heavy warships around Ghorn IV, nothing nearby.

Imperial doctrine - and what an aid to the rebels it was - called for an aggressive response; instead of doing something sensible, like raising planetary shields on low power and sending for a hunter group to chase the rebels away, they would scramble the garrison fighters.

M'lanth's lead triad of X-wings peeled off to deal with the alert flight; the four pairs of bombers dived into the atmosphere.

Their shields soaked up the heat of re-entry and deceleration, leaving them plunging ballistically through the upper air, S-turning to bring them down to a practical repulsor flight speed and heading for the treetops. It was their most vulnerable phase; they were lucky the garrison didn't react in time.

Grannic's flight were headed straight for trouble, skimming the planetary capital; prisons, public spaces. The flight Franjia was part of was going wider, three provincial starports to scan.

At top practical speed- running on painfully weak gravitic engines- the B-wings' speed gave the Y's fifty kph in hand; and meant the planetary garrison TIEs could catch them easily.

Grannic was running with his sensors active as they came up on the outskirts, scanning forward; the other pair of Y's were focusing on one building after another.

Aron slammed his repulsors into reverse, they lanced ahead of him, he accelerated forward in chase and hammered all three of them with sensor and fire control pulses, one after the other.

'You're going to fight your way past at least a flight of garrison TIEs- you want it to be this easy for them? Concentrate on the target once you get to the target.'

Franjia's flight had three provincial city starports to scan, suborbital ion hops between them; each port had a defence flight, to pursue fleeing criminals as much as anything else.

The first had two TIEs on ready racks out in the open; they were the first target. They should have been airborne already- perhaps the controller had been reprimanded for a premature launch before; however it happened, they were too late. The flight leader hosed one down- missing wild at first, unfamiliar gun layout, hammering the ground spewing loose and fused earth everywhere. The second was starting to lift when Franjia took a single aimed shot that hit it in the right wing hub.

It fireballed, the pilot's ejector seat took him clear to seven hundred metres and his gravchute started to drift him down.

Franjia started a tight evasive weave, looking for the defence flight hangar and turrets; she was relieved she hadn't killed him - in theory she was prepared for that, in practise she was happy to postpone the moment. Relief turned to horror when she saw one of the X-wings curve after the falling black figure. She rolled out and climbed after him on a brief flash of ion drive.

Normally that was a dumb move in air - the dumping of ekawatts of energy into thick lower atmosphere made a pretty good explosion substitute. The astromech screamed in protest, lightning bolts crackled to earth off the ion trail, and the shockwave the miserable aerodynamics of the Y-wing trailed behind it slammed into the X-wing and sent it tumbling.

Franjia rolled out at the top of the zoom. 'How dare you!' she shouted over the com. 'You call yourselves the side of good and you shoot at ejected pilots?'

M'Lanth had been manoeuvring to line up on her; the tumbling X-wing said 'Hey, all I wanted was a gun camera shot.'

'Of a man in a mask?' Franjia spat back.

'Iyran, both of you, calm down and get back in formation.'

Not before time- the relative handful of defence turrets around the port were shooting at them now. Green, red, orange, blue - a low-rent garrison like this, they got the tail end of every gas shipment.

It made for an interesting light show, but not when it was happening to you. Most of the bolts were converging on the high, cover flight. Franjia rolled and dived using the column of shredded air as cover; one of the high X-wings got coned, trapped between converging streams of fire. The B-wing went for one of the turrets, covering him; all three Y's did the same. Too late- the X-wing tried to turn on one of them, flew too straight for too long, the converging fire hit and splashed it.

The rest dived for cover, the defence turrets looked for a fresh target; they found the B-wing, and it's shields started to come apart; Franjia came up off the deck in a half-roll, line of fire trailing her across the sky, sent a stream of laser and ion fire into the defence tower next to the port control tower.

The fire control wasn't as good, but more than enough for a stationary target. It's shields blew in and the quad laser fireballed.

She had no problems at all with that kind of target. Point defence weapons were no pilot's friend - and they were Imperial Army anyway. The rest of the defensive flight - that would be the hangar; empty. Withdrawn, or - on instinct she broke hard right, skimming less than three metres off the ground, shields sparkling with the flare of bursting blaster bolts and shrapnel.

Two TIEs, two old Z-95; one of the TIEs went after the B-wing, which wallowed - the TIE overshot, blasting chunks out of the landing apron, the B-wing couldn't catch it as it swung clear for another pass. The '95 which went after her flew by and banked, almost a pylon turn. It was relying on aerodynamics; she went for brute force- spun on the repulsors, laid up a high deflection shot as it tried to line her up- hit it and sent it tumbling, the second shot was a kill.

One of the Y's exploded under a stream of laser fire, the TIE- sensibly- flew from there to the city, to hide behind the buildings and wait to be reinforced- or for a chance at a shot in the back. The second '95 did the same after spraying fire over two Y-wings, denting their shields- but the old blasters needed a long, steady stream of fire on target. The X's pursued, the remaining bombers went after the turrets; Franjia broke off the chase to deal with the mission, scanning the warehouses and bays of the starport.

It was small by galactic standards; total volume of trade less than a million tons a day. Zig-zagging and rooftop hopping, it was a matter of moments for her astromech to find life signs. Masses of them; the Y-wing's computer tried to distinguish them through the jamming and lost count. 'I have either a herd of nerf, or a jail.'

Calculated risk time; whereabouts in the building - there. It was a large square block with an undulating roof, some mad bout of architecture. She picked the far edge of the building and blew one of the roof ridges off. Blast carried the debris clear; the shock disrupted the jammers and security screens long enough to get a good look.

'It's a jail. They're in there, two thousand plus, mostly human, don't seem to have been too badly mistreated yet.'

The planetary capital was naturally more heavily defended. The first thing Aron did as his Y-wing brought the city down over the horizon was look for the garrison ase- looming, slab-sided, tower-topped - and lob a proton torpedo at it.

'You're crazy! They'll-' one of the Rebels shouted.

'They're reacting anyway - suppress them. Slow fire, make them shoot torps, not us, keep the TIEs in their hangars for fear of blast. Kriffing well fire.'

One of the Y's lobbed a torpedo after Aron's; he was thinking, city. Maze. Repulsors gave off nothing like an ion signature. How do I spot a defending fighter in a maze of mirrors; and on the other side, how do they find me?

By coming and looking. Already over the suburbs, less than thirty seconds from the city centre and the public buildings, when his sensors identified two four- strong flights of TIE fighters, one high, one low.

The X-wings raced ahead, the high TIEs slowed to meet them and the low flight curved up underneath; Aron accelerated up to meet them- locking on to one which began to weave, faking it out by switching his targeting computer off and spraying shot at it's wingman; unguided, unheralded- he missed low with the lasers but the ion bolts hit the eyeball dead centre.

Not exactly aerodynamic, the pilot could have tried to fight it down to a dead stick landing- but he did the sensible thing instead and punched out, the fighter tumbling down to hit and explode in someone's swimming pool.

The chemical-looking flare of rupturing capacitors flashed the water into a rising pillar of steam. A dogfight in fog. Fun.

The other six- against X's, in atmosphere, at two to one- the X's sprayed fire over the formations and broke.

One of the TIEs got clipped, half a wing broken off, it spiralled down still under power, with the pilot aiming for a controlled crash; an X-wing got hit in the upper port engine, the S-foil tore away and it spun out of control. Two of the TIE's dived after it, the B-wing, relatively better off in atmosphere, moved to cover- the lone TIE went after it.

The new bomber shot at the TIE, brilliant crimson heavy laser and red-orange autoblasters, the TIE- wearing flight commander's stripes- rolled high and right out of the streams and put two twin laser bolts into the B-wing. Its shields flickered and crashed, Aron nailed the TIE a split second before it could finish the job.

Two for me, Aron thought, too late to stop the crippled X-wing being finished off. The pilot punched out.

Before anything else, Aron lobbed another torpedo at the garrison base. His astromech watched the sensors, the TIEs were actually giving the remaining pair of X a relatively easy time, herding them and holding them in check; most of them were going after the bombers.

One TIE dipped down towards Aron; he swung towards it aiming about twenty degrees off-rolling round some sort of district facility, a fire tower he thought - the TIE pilot tried to be fancy, aim with the gun offset.

It was a good design idea badly executed; there were simpler ways to do it. Sienar made a big - and clumsy - deal of it because the big gun on a small frame of the TIE needed the engines specifically reset to soak up the recoil; they ramped up the ergonomic difficulties to match the practical difficulties.

Cygnus, with the heavier Starwing, had been playing with the idea of an eyeball sight - servo equipped weapon mounts linked to an aiming reticule that fit over the pilot's eye.

Aron's Y-wing had a turret. Only ion cannon, but the little side-stick controlled them a lot more easily; high deflection, he hosed the ion stream on to the TIE- aiming down, one of his shots hit a house and blacked it out, another started an electrical fire, then he connected.

The TIE fell out of the sky, too low for reaction time, it hit the ground and tumbled like a jack until it broke up.

Two more of the TIEs were down, one of the Y-wings had an engine pod in flames; and the garrison base was launching another flight.

One of them was a /gt; Aron realised when it tried to get out of the way of his last torpedo and failed. The point defence guns caught it; not a clean hit, the torp had a split millisecond to detonate in, and did. The blast caught the /gt, and the load of proton bombs on board detonated. The flare shredded two of the fighters and sent the others tumbling, left the face of the garrison base blackened and sintered.

That- literally- cleared the air, but from the total of forty, that was less than twelve dealt with, and the strike force would run out of fighters first. There would be smaller elements scattered around the planet, too, '95s as well as TIEs.

Aron dived to roof height and redlined his repulsors, astromech unit complaining and barely managing to hold them together. Time to think objective - get it done, get out.

The prisoners themselves weren't the problem. It was the other end of the 'humiliating and painful death' process Aron was searching for. Something public - probably not the governor's palace, possibly the garrison but he hoped not; and he had a city centre to play with.

Never mind womp rats. As a young capitoline thug, zooming through crowded skyways at absurd speeds was routine for him; the last time he had done this, he was being chased by the police.

How many of the gang would have been prepared to join the Rebellion…actually, probably most of them; and the best thing he could do for the Empire might be to go back and encourage them. They'd have the Rebel Alliance's reputation in tatters within the week.

He'd never gone wallsurfing in anything as solid as a Y-wing before; the droid was a drawback- if it was possible for an astromech to have an apoplectic fit, his was - but the thing was a lot tougher than any swoop. Which gave him an idea.

Right now, defence coordination had the opposite problem; they would be getting swamped. People calling and com'ing from all over the city, to report, to complain, just to panic. There had been some damage to the city, but the/gt had been an airburst, not really damaging anything except windows and vid reception. Unless the garrison did something outrageously stupid - like trying to shoot through buildings to get him, not impossible that they would be that dumb - it was just standard monstrously illegal city flying.

People shooting at him was nothing unusual, but repulsortanks- that was less fun.

Ground forces had been activated, and one of them picked up on him - a technically obsolete Sabre-class tank. He had to swerve down a side loop to avoid it - it came after him.

He had four hundred and eighty km/h in hand, but couldn't use all of them in a cityscape, and it could fly through buildings a lot more efficiently than he could.

The city wasn't laid out on a grid; it was organised around linked loops of ring skyways, which made for fast flying- past hordes of shoppers and commuters and delivery vans.

Was it right to hose them with ion fire to create an obstruction? Probably not. It might be fun, but it wouldn't necessarily work, either.

Flash right, a flicker of office windows to his left, someone threw a computer out of a window at him; bit of repressed frustration coming through there.

Zig-zag, trying to lose the tank - it knew the city better and got ahead, curved out of an intersection after him, but not firing; public building ahead. Fire coming at him from the rooftop - streams of blaster bolts. That made it a non-trivial problem.

An Imperial Security Bureau office, apparently; right, Aron thought, as Imperial or Rebel, I hate them either way.

They were using E-Webs on him; a strange gun, for something that size it threw a surprisingly light bolt - but the rate of fire was very high and the recoil was virtually nonexistent. Held steady, pounding bolt-streams into the same aim point, it could chew through warship grade durasteel in seconds.

The Sabre had the sense to stop shooting at him, but the CompForce fools on the roof were dumb enough to keep firing past him and catch it in the cone of fire; the rain of blaster bolts gnawed at the hull, blew off the stabiliser fins, killed the secondary light cannon, demolished sensors and fire control, took out the vision devices.

Flying blind and paralysed, the tank tried to ground - on the roof. Three of the power generators ruptured and detonated, the tank rolled over and the crew crawled out.

Aron couldn't resist it; the damage to the armoured roof made it a tempting target.

He pulled the Y-wing up in a hammerhead turn, attracting TIE attention. It took very little mental effort to think of those things coming at him as the enemy; they were designed to frighten and intimidate.

Only the elite got to personalise their fighters; the wing commander on his previous destroyer had "You lookin' at me?" painted on the side of his Interceptor. Like thousands of others, probably, but it summed up perfectly. The rebs were right to call them 'eyeballs'; They were looking at you.

From them at least, looks could kill. Do the deed and run.

Aron dived on the building, put a couple of shots into the underbelly of the tank. Its reactor vessel ruptured, sending a gush of eye-blasting light out. His viewscreen went dark, he switched to proton torps, as vision started to return he shot a pair off at the hole, untargeted through the sepia haze; hurdled the far edge of the roof, doubled shields aft.

The TIEs had the sense to stay clear and give them room to detonate. They were semi-directed antiship warheads, they slammed through the roof and blew up. Most of the blast went downwards into the body of the vaguely pyramidal, fifty- storey building, enough spread to gush out of the roof and the windows like an erupting volcano.

Aron rode part of the concussion wave away, astromech screaming something like 'I resign' as the building burnt and collapsed in on itself. Later on, he would get the shakes. Right then, all he thought was - crispy fried cop. I could probably get a commendation from both sides.

He had gained distance there; he wanted enough clear space to, at least, break for orbit - he rolled right, dived down a ring-way underpass. It turned out to be a bad move. He hurdled a jack-knifed cargo train, went the wrong way round a split, avoided a subsurface residential complex, made surface again and climbed to break for orbit; but he had been predictable, and there were a flight of TIEs waiting for him.

He tried to bank round on to one, and found the entire fighter following him; damn aircraft - like repulsors - he had to twist away as the TIEs opened fire. They were, in contrast, probably overtrained; they were having difficulty keeping out of each other's way, and they were all chasing the same fire solution - he didn't have to worry about dodging a cone of fire, just a stream.

He shot past them out into the open air, looking for room to fight in; they followed him up, and two cone-shaped glows flashed past him on the way down. He had missed the announcement; they had found it, the stadium was being prepped. Franjia's comment about blenders wasn't that far from the truth.

Most of the rebel fighters were breaking for orbit; she had counted them and missed him. A fast suborbital hop on ion thrust to the capital, and two altitude fused proton torps fired into the formation; on repulsor, they couldn't break away fast enough.

The blast broke one TIE - its wings folded up, the pilot dived out of the shattered viewport - and detonated another, sent the outer pair tumbling away on the shockwave; she lined up on the one that looked to be recovering control fastest, and sent single shots after him.

The pilot threw the controls away, deliberately losing control to avoid being hit; it worked until he flew into an office tower. Aron tried for the last with turret ion fire, but she got to it first, ripping the top of the eyeball open.

Both of them wasted no time - pointed the nose up, lit off ion engines on all the power the shields could sustain and rocketed out of the atmosphere to a safe jump distance.

'How did you do?' she asked him. Her astromech was twittering away on a side band, trying to calm his down.

'Five, a tank and an ISB office. You?'

'Six and a handful of defence turrets - nice work on the office.' She said.

'You're not - I mean, they were…'

The ISB are thugs, not police.' She said scornfully. 'No concept of law, even less of justice. Good riddance.'

'Speaking of the law-incoming corvette.' Aron noticed.

'Hit it.' Barely into full vacuum, a Lancer bearing down on them, they and the surviving rebels bolted for hyperspace.

Nine fighters arrived at the rendezvous, one of those, a Y-wing, so badly shot up the pilot and droid ejected as soon as they re-entered a bradyonic state, one of the B-wings with large pieces missing.

Chandrillia Rose was accompanied by a positive battle group - by rebel rather than Imperial standards. Three Corvettes, two MC30s and a Quasar Fire, another Nebulon, a Neutron Star and what appeared to be the flagship MC40 light cruiser- frigate, by Imperial standards.

It was a fairly impressive force. Well above Sector's estimates - well below Lennart's hopes.

'Aron, does that Neutron Star look familiar to you?'

'Well, the charred spot on it's dorsal mid surface is a bit of a giveaway. Do you think we should admit it?' He asked her.

'Considering that they've just monitored us saying it anyway, we might as well.'

The squadron - what was left of it - was ordered to divert to the cruiser-carrier, and land there. At least it was easier than touching down on a Nebulon-B.

Large bays, amazingly full - they must have been resupplied; there was a squadron of the strange local fighters, cylinders with cruciform weapon pods, a squadron of Gauntlets, squadron of T-wings, squadron of Y-wings. The locals left to make room for them - exchanging with the Rose.

There was a crowd around the battered fighters as they floated on to dispersal pads and shut down, pilots, navy and ground forces; Aron's astromech was shaking as it was lowered to the deck, a robopsychologist led it away, pestered by a flight and two naval officers wanting the data.

Good and bad, Franjia thought. They seem to be taking the bait; but we have a whole new set of people to explain ourselves to. Eight corvettes and two frigates. Fourteen squadrons, maybe.

M'Lanth came over to them. 'Between them, my lads scored seven, I lost five with three ejected. You two alone racked up eleven.'

The flight controller waiting to debrief him was horrified. 'Five. Five fighters and five good men.'

Franjia and Aron both thought what any Imperial pilot would under the circumstances; the definition of 'good' was that you didn't get shot down.

'For eighteen.' She said, calmly. 'And success.'

'The security building,' Aron said, 'is mine.'

'It might be all for nothing.' The junior lieutenant flight controller said. 'We sent a preliminary report, and…sector are considering doing nothing.'

'What?' Aron exploded in anger. Actually, that was a bad metaphor for someone who had access to proton torpedoes. He looked like he would like to make someone explode.

Franjia's mind raced; a loyalty test? Simulating cold anger bought her a second to work out what she ought to say.

'If this is some kind of loyalty test, it's sick. Conspiracy theories be damned, are you really going to stand aside and let your comrades be inventively and grotesquely abused to death in front of an audience of trillions? If you're thinking about the martyrs-' she said; people were starting to listen.

'The Empire kills lots of people.' The controller said, looking at the deck and muttering.

'You're supposed to be trying to stop them.' Aron grabbed the controller and shook him. 'They're trying to make it look like you can't look after your own.'

'It's not a finished decision.' The controller protested. 'There are a lot of us prepared to argue against it - but they're going to want to talk to you. Your information could be crucial.'

They went along with the process that far; after a basic - and paralysingly sloppy - debrief that seemed to have more to do with telling war stories than objective analysis, there was a full scale flotilla conference.

I was right about joining the ranks of anarchy, Franjia thought; there were half a dozen arguments going back and forth in the auditorium, and the senior officer was the Mon Cal cruiser-frigate- captain; he was formal and dignified, and not a natural Basic speaker.

It took him four attempts to call the council of war to order. What a time for an ambush, Aron thought.

The recon squadron were in the spotlight. Two Imperial defectors were a point of interest; when Aron corrected the intel officer - they were from a regional force unit, not the sector fleet - attention centred on them.

Game on, Aron thought; this - spreading confusion and lies - was what they were here for.

'So,' the Mon Cal Captain burbled slowly at them, permanently in a state of thinking of the next word, 'what does the regional support group think of this? What are their intentions?'

Keyed up - Aron's mind suddenly went blank. 'We're just fighter jockeys. I can't be sure, but-'

'For three days before we left,' Franjia said, 'we were exercising twelve hours a day - against other Imperial ships.'

'Really?' one of the human officers asked. 'Attacking or defending?'

'Both.' Franjia said. 'If our ship was anything to go by, Region now considers Sector to be slack to the point of encouraging rebellion. Captain Lennart wouldn't object to attacking either side.'

The argument revolved around that for a while - the possibility of getting Imperial forces shooting at each other and sneaking a rescue in in the confusion; both the Imperials listened carefully.

'Perhaps,' one of the Intel people said slyly, 'the regional forces could be persuaded to attack Sector?' He was looking at Aron and Franjia. If they were stupid spies, they would agree, want to be sent back - and get stunshot and arrested immediately.

'Possible,' Franjia said, 'but the pretext? Assume, for the sake of argument, that it happens - what then? The Moff's going to be replaced by someone who knows he's liable to have higher authority sit on him at any moment - and that he has to be more fanatic than thou to keep his job.'

'A straight up smash and grab rescue,' Aron said, 'that could be written off as business as usual - standard issue local force laziness and incompetence. It'd make a splash, but not one big enough to drown in.'

The intel officer looked disappointed.

The argument rumbled on; polarising the force. It boiled down to the Mon Cal's fear of traps; they seemed to be the main force behind the idea of doing nothing. Aron glared at him. I don't think of myself as particularly xenophobic, he was thinking; but…

'Galactic Spirit,' he shouted at them, 'you're outnumbered fifty to one. How do you expect to survive, how do you expect to rally people to the cause, if you go around being afraid? If all you have are long shots, that's what you have to take.'

Franjia supported him, yelling over the rising noise, 'It could be better for you if it was a trap. The sector force is criminally incompetent; if you can save your comrades and humiliate the defence force, that's two victories for the price of one.'

Most of the human rebels were, broadly, in agreement.

'Were you involved in the capture of the Caderath?' the Mon Cal burbled, using the name the Fulgur had served the republic under.

'No - we were busy putting dents in this ship at the time.' Aron admitted.

'Remember what you said about spending the rest of our lives in debriefing?' Franjia muttered to him.

Unexpectedly, the Neutron Star's commander backed them. 'You're right. We've been eroding away here, compromising and working around, playing it safe. Trap, or not - that's a matter of tactics; politically, strategically, we have no choice - we have to put up or shut up.'

'Thank you.' Franjia said to him.

'You owe me a sector jammer.' He replied. 'He's right,' meaning the Mon Cal Captain, 'it probably is a trap, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if you had something to do with it; but would the Empire abandon its people like that?'

'If it would cause more losses getting them back, then by the book, yes.' Aron admitted.

'You see, no choice.' He said; left his seat, moved to talk to the Mon Cal quietly.

'You trust them?' the Mon Cal said, surprised.

'I respect their competence.' The human said. 'Face it; we always knew it was going to be a trap. The Empire offers us the choice of losing ships and men, or losing face. Too obvious.'

'Then why,' burble, 'do you wish to attack?'

'If we commit up front, we can get in, make the pickup, and get out before the jaws of the trap close. Move fast, and I reckon we can beat this one. And they're right;' meaning Aron and Franjia, 'if we don't at least take the chance, what do we look like?'

'All my instincts say, cut our losses.' The Calamari captain said.

'Sometimes, there is truth in platitude. The boldest measure may, indeed, be the safest.' The human urged.  
'I do not like situations where the enemy dictates our spectrum of choice.'

The Mon Cal took a second to compose himself, and pointed to the two Imperial pilots. 'Whether or not they are spies sent to mislead us, or genuine fighters for freedom, I believe they are destined to lead us to disaster.'


	14. Chapter 14

Autokrator-class Star Destroyers were not the largest ships in the Star Fleet, but they were some of the fastest.

The first ship of the class had been HIMS Arrogant, and that was how they were usually known by the Basic- speaking majority of the galaxy; this one, Dynamic, was on exercise - her new captain working her up to something he considered efficiency.

Captain Delvran Dordd was not particularly enjoying it so far.

I've been spoiled, he thought. I should have thought to poach about ten LTL crews from Black Prince. They were conducting a fire-and-motion exercise, target drones hiding in an asteroid field, a fast flyby-vector parallel to the edge of the field, two thousand klicks per second at one hundred thousand out.

Dynamic's gun crews had missed every one of the TIE-sized target drones so far. Compared to an Imperator, its turret arrangement was back to front, and more sensible for it.

She carried medium turbolasers by the smaller superstructure, heavy turrets in the axial defence position, stepped enough to fire past each other directly forward. Their huge fire arc was what made the Arrogant-class effective flankers and pursuit ships, provided the gun crews could shoot straight.

They were dry-firing, firing local control active sensor pulses instead of shot. In theory, the target drones would light off their beacons when hit and manoeuvre out of the asteroid field for recovery. It was still only a theory.

It wasn't impossible that they were missing on purpose, just to spite him. He had started by putting the ship through its paces: terrible.

They took eight full minutes to get to general quarters from a standing start. They passed training norms by the oldest dodge in the book - take a turret; each crew was supposed to pass the tests independently.

All the training time and resources went to the handful that showed some sign of talent, and they remote controlled the turret for the rest who sat there and pretended.

Maintenance and engineering - the same. On all the standard evolutions, the overall impression was of a crew who were barely keeping their heads above water. All of which was made worse by his knowing if not exactly all the tricks, then at least more of them than they did.

Dordd turned to his chief gunnery officer, present on the bridge for the exercise, and thought about what he wanted to say. Anger warred with prudence - on one hand, they were genuinely very poor verging on abysmal. Bawling them out would at least relive some of his tension. On the other hand, anger might be a luxury he couldn't afford. He had never appreciated before how comfortable stormtroopers were to have around.

Was it even possible to push this crew hard enough that they broke under the strain? They felt more like a sponge - damp, gooey, structureless, prone to flop around and lie there.

Looking on the bright side, at least they were capable of most of the standard evolutions. At a pace that suggested most of the officers were reading out of their ops manuals as they went along, true, and benchmarking out as barely good enough to be in the Starfleet, never mind on a fleet destroyer. Some of it was natural confusion and nerves following the change of command, but more of it was simple unreadiness.

The previous captain had been promoted, if that was the word, to command one of the search lines of a patrol squadron; the job was essentially a dead end, a cemetery for the living. The only way to restart a career from there was to actually find some trouble and do well dealing with it - chance would be a fine thing.

Dordd, on the other hand - they were walking very wary around him so far. He had come from a crack ship; cracked, most would have said, but Black Prince's gun crews would have dropped all twelve drones in less than a minute.

'Gentlemen,' he addressed the bridge crew, all of whom were at least male if not necessarily noble of spirit, 'this ship is supposed to be a destroyer. A unit of significance to the fleet. While it is all well and good to be able to intimidate with size and strength, you may find it hard to deliver on that promise if the gun crews can't hit the broad side of a nebula.'

'Sir,' the exec stood up for his ship, defending the indefensible, 'this is frontier space; minor colonies and outposts, we're the largest thing for thirty parsecs in any direction.'

'How many moments do you think that would take to change?' Dordd snapped.

'Alliance local forces spend a lot of their time hiding from the Empire; they tend to be around trainee, or complacent garrison, levels. Alliance strike, regional and central command units tend to get committed to combat more often than any except our strategic pursuit forces, and be that much more experienced and battle-hardened.'

One of the pit crew muttered something about the Tarkin Doctrine.

'Ah, yes, rule through the fear of force rather than force itself. Efficient.' Dordd said, watching their faces to see who twitched, who looked like a security service plant.  
'Unfortunately, that doctrine made the Starfleet thoroughly hated throughout the mid-rim and outwards, and cost the empire at least one obnoxiously self-righteous but basically wealthy and tax-paying planet.  
'That, and one barely-used battle station splattered across the void by a rebel strategic strike team, with contents including more of the cream of the Starfleet than we could afford to lose, and Wilhuff Tarkin. I'm interested in the facts of force.'

The exec - Dordd was having difficulty remembering all their names; Ilarchu Rondat - no, Ridatt. He kept trying.

'Captain, we train to meet the sector standing doctrine, which says close range, closely grouped fire - we're prohibited from engaging at all beyond five thousand kilometres, strongly advised to close to point blank, under two hundred, before opening fire. We've seen precisely one rebel ship, ever.'

Not that far away from Imperial standard practise; the theory being that you needed high hit rates to get the power transfer to pound down an enemy ship's shielding, which was true enough, but that you needed to close to almost 'can't miss' range to do it was less certain.

Even in fleets and with ships that could do better - the Executor-class being the prime example - most stayed fairly close to the doctrine of decisive action at close range.

Necessity often dictated otherwise, and the physical performance of turbolasers was more than up to it, but the gunners frequently weren't. Lennart's and his gun crews' willingness to fire at distant, manoeuvring targets was extraordinary by most standards, verging on freakish.

Dordd was almost surprised to realise how corrupted he had become. For a second or two he thought about it; stick to the established doctrine, they couldn't blame him for that, or do something different. No contest.

'I know. It's suicidal against a larger ship, counterproductive against a smaller - likely to burn more fuel chasing it down than simply hosing it from long range would.  
'You came up against one ion-scarred corvette whose hyperdrive failed on reversion, and it took you forty-seven minutes to catch it and kill it. If it had taken you that many seconds, it would have been over average. It's not good enough.'

He looked at the main tactical holo. They were clear of the exercise track, drifting away along the edge of the zone. 'Helm, bring us around, reciprocal, same separation, eighteen-fifty KPS relative.'

Star Destroyer manoeuvrability was a debateable issue; there were at least four different ways to turn a ship.

Throttling back one outer main engine and firewalling the other could spin an Imperator end for end faster than it took to throw the switches, but the shock that inflicted on the ship's stabilisers and compensators made it a once or twice in a lifetime manoeuvre.

Off-centre thrust from the auxiliary engines was the doctrine prescribed emergency turn procedure, the thrust deflectors were usual and in the event of complete thruster failure, recoil from the guns could do.

None of them worked if you didn't have the energy. Or the competence.

'Captain, I have to warn you,' the navigator told him, 'we're approaching our allowable exercise limit.'

'Already?' Penny-pinching was an at least partial explanation, but this was ridiculous. 'Give me the data.' Dordd said, holding out a hand for the datapad.

'Sir, I don't have the figures to hand, but-'

'Then get them. I'll stand in for you while you compile.'

Dordd gave the helm orders himself; instead of simply rotating and retrofiring, he spun the ship in a combat curve, a long u-shape that cost energy but preserved velocity, and hopefully kept the ship from being hit. As often, anyway. He finished the end loop, on plan, and had the datapad handed to him.

His first instinct was to throw it away - his second to find the idiot responsible, sheath the datapad in ablat foam and drop it on him, her or it from orbit.

'This is ridiculous. This is hardly enough to warm the engines up, never mind real training. The sector budget only allows fifty minutes a month at full power?'

'Sir, that's still billions of-' the navigator began.

'Agreeing with an economist is like agreeing with a prosecution attorney. No good ever comes of it. Have you been using even that?'

'We have been fulfilling fleet training norms.' Ridatt stated.

'Only on paper- and are you really content to fight a war on paper? With the fleet bureaucracy? This-' he threw the datapad away, hitting the disposal chute- 'is farcical. Not enough to do any real training on. I'm surprised some of the turrets haven't frozen solid. In fact,' looking at gunnery's fire distribution chart, 'I think some of the PD weapons have. We don't have the fuel allowance even to recover our drones?'

'Officially, no, Captain.'

'Hmph.' Dordd grunted, walked down into the pit, to one of the drone control consoles; the operator's eyes bulged out at the sequence of commands he keyed in. Most of the drones started to drift back towards the Dynamic; two headed deeper into the asteroid belt.

'Interrogate them.' Dordd commanded; an active sensor pulse sparkled off them, both of their identifier blips changed colour in the main display. Enemy - specifically, Alliance - red.

'Those things have enough processing power to be treacherous, don't they? They must have decided they were tired of getting shot at. They're defecting. This is no longer an exercise.' Dodd said, decisive-sounding. 'Live fire, engage and destroy.'

The bridge crew boggled at him. He shouted at them. 'Move.'

The turrets were slow to react, half of them called fire direction control to query, several kept firing scan pulses, but one of the main turrets took it too far and fired a full power HTL bolt. The ship rocked back and an asteroid near the centre of the belt got turned into a plasma doughnut - the bolt overpenetrating, the head flashing it into vapour and the tail of the bolt smearing the cloud out along the line of fire.

'Just as well. We'd never have been able to get away with that on the exercise budget…' Dordd managed to keep a perfectly straight face as he said it. 'Guns, did you instruct them to do that? Fire a teraton-level shot?'

'No, Sir, I instructed them to engage as per standing orders.'

'Really?' Dordd looked, studying, the overweight, jowly Lieutenant-Commander. 'I heard your fire order. Precise and disciplined - it was not. Loose words and panic are understandable when, for instance, you are drifting at high speed towards a division of Alliance cruisers - they are never permissible.'

The gunnery officer briefly closed his eyes and waited to be sacked; not quite yet, Delvran Dordd thought, not until someone demonstrates sufficient competence to do the job instead. He pointed at the drone images in the display.

'I notice they're not dead yet.'

Guns looked at him blankly for a second, before realising what was being asked of him. Hesitantly, trying to remember how it was done in the manual, he gave a phased, grouped fire order, too slow to be useful in combat; a more or less coordinated volley of shot blasted out.

One of the drones got a close enough near miss to activate its hardwired routines, it shut engines down and signalled a hit.

'It's playing pittin, finish it off.'

This time, against a stationary target - they missed again. Nearly got it with blast waves and fragments, but not quite.

'This ship does have torpedo tubes, doesn't it?' Dordd knew perfectly well it did; for one thing, the drones had been launched from them.

'Yes, Sir - shall I fire them, Sir?'

'I think you had better.' Dordd said, looking down at him.

Two tubes fired; torps catapulted out, energising themselves- violet-tinged red teardrop- shaped electromagnetic sheaths forming around the warhead cones. Although less effective at normal combat range, they were at least more interesting to watch than a TL bolt. They twisted and weaved through the asteroids, caught and detonated on both drones.

'Secure and stand down.' Dordd ordered. 'On the evidence, I would be better off dismantling some of our torpedo stock, removing the guidance computers and replacing most of the gunners with them.'

'Sir,' the exec said, 'that's not really fair, after all it was only a pair of drones-'

'You think their performance would be improved if the targets were shooting back? Perhaps we should go further - invite the Rebellion to come and attack us. Yes, definitely. They might think it was an ambush and avoid us, that could be this ship's best chance of survival.'

He looked round the frightened bridge officers.

'There will be no more live firing unless needs must - for one thing, they may be a danger to themselves, we seem to have an electrical fire in no. 17 LTL mount. Exec, go and sort that out, will you?'

Ridatt hurried off the bridge, to the little electric cart waiting there. They raced those things up and down the corridors...have to put a stop to that. Eventually. No sense beginning with the trivial.

'Simulations.' he continued, 'We will simulate until the crew's eyes go square. Clearly they need it.' He stalked off the bridge to his day cabin, to begin drafting an exercise programme.

To be fair to them, it wasn't really their fault. In the growth surges, first from the Republic Starfleet, neglected, demoralised and understrength, to the cauldron of the Clone Wars, then from there to the dominating presence they needed to secure the peace of the Empire - the fleet had long since outrun any available reserve of trained personnel.

The early clone crews had, arguably, been misused; it would have made more sense if the pattern had been clone officers and petty officers in charge of womb-born ordinary spacers, rather than the other way around.

There weren't really enough veterans available to serve as instructors for the rest, never mind cadre or full crews, and the womb-born parts of the Republic Starfleet had learned a frightening amount of their business through on the job trial and error - much the same way the Rebels were attempting to do now.

Fine, if it had stopped there, but it hadn't. The fleet kept growing, drawing in more and more raw meat, and the only people whose competence was keeping up with demand were the yard workers; real talent and experience just kept getting spread thinner and thinner.

Combat hardened crews, but, perversely, the Imperial Starfleet's very size worked against it there too; there were seldom enough enemies to go round. It also left parent units faced with the choice of keeping together a successful crew and depriving the rest of the fleet of a useful cadre, or breaking up a winning team. Like himself; he was fairly sure now that he had been transferred out of a crack squadron, which had managed to establish consistently very high standards, to pull this ship into acceptable shape.

Imperial discipline was generally ferocious, and doctrine so precisely descriptive, because the alternative seemed to be shambolic, fratricidal chaos. Privately, Dordd doubted this crew had that much energy.

An hour later, the com/scan chief officer entered, looking sheepish. A lot of the burden would fall on him; what was this about?

'Captain, we have an incoming message - holo, encrypted, Captain's Eyes Only.'

'Route it through.'

Dordd had to type in the access codes from his rank cylinder personally; he didn't understand what extra level of security that might confer, but it was enough. The message unfolded.

A robed, yellow-eyed figure; Dordd started to go down on one knee, then realised from the shape of the head, the breadth of the shoulders, it wasn't actually His Imperial Majesty, just someone who favoured the same tailor. Pre-recorded; no need to reply.

'I am Kor Alric Adannan,' the hooded figure identified himself, 'Private secretary to Privy Councillor Gwellib ap-Lewff.'

Double-plus ungood, Brenn thought. What could a being with high connections, and a voice that sounded like a death threat, want with him? Couldn't be anything to do with him himself, or this ship.

'Captain Dordd, I am empowered to exercise the oversight authority of the Council.'

Which was terrifying enough, but something else niggled - the background noise. Asteroid effects from Adannan's ship's environment - awareness system.

Dordd left the message playing, bolted out on to the bridge, grabbed the PA,

'All hands, prepare to receive VIP visitors, I need a Regulatory Branch honour guard at the docking bay.'  
Only just in time. They were already on docking approach.

Adannan's ship was clearly a custom job, light freighter weight class but military spec; black, an X-shaped arrowhead, an array of folding radiator fins that made the wicked little dart vastly overpowered for its size.

It also only barely fit in the 'bayless' destroyer's very limited docking space.

That's going to make resupply awkward, Dordd thought, irrelevantly. As if that deserved to rate as a serious problem, when Destiny is about to land on us with a distinctly sickening thud.

The regulatory branch - nearly absent from most ships where the stormtroopers took over the duty, basically the police of the navy - managed to scrape together enough bodies to make a decent show of it, all clutching obsolescent A280 rifles, shined and polished as best as may be in ten minutes' notice.

A ramp extended, the "private secretary" - and what was he really, if one was to dare to put a name to it? Enforcer, executioner? That was how Adannan carried himself. He stalked down it, to the deck; shorter than Dordd, but - how did someone with a shrouded face manage to have any kind of expression at all? He looked perfectly prepared to melt through Dordd with a glance until the head and shoulders of the tall, thin man dropped down to his eyeline.

Which, by then, would be pointless, but Adannan didn't look the sort to let that get in the way of personal expression through violence.

Almost amazing in its way, Dordd thought of his bridge team; with all the galaxy and its statistically inevitable leaven of bloodthirsty madmen to draw on, how few of them were actually in it for the joy of hurting people. Adannan looked to be the exception that proved the rule.

'Captain Dordd.' Adannan recalled him to his duty. And what did duty have to do with creatures like this? 'You may introduce your officers to me.'

Dordd had been close to wishing some of them dead, or at least dismissed the service; at least now he knew he didn't mean it literally. He began with the exec; Ridatt looked at Adannan like a mouse faced with a dianoga. He shakily extended a hand that Adannan glared at, the exec retracted it sheepishly. Dordd introduced the rest of his senior team, with one eye on Adannan's followers filing out of the transport.

His entourage was as bad or worse, some of them victims rather than perpetrators. One compu-mod carrying servant, black and yellow livery, looked scrubbed to within an inch of his life, and two likewise liveried twi'lek wearing electrocollars who looked whipped there instead, one male and one female.

One man who looked the sort who gets sacked from the ISB for excessive brutality, an insignia-less uniform with weapon-like bulges under both arms and at both hips- what did a man need with four pistols?

A scaly, spiky-faced alien in a half-tunic, half-robe that almost certainly also held more than a few devices of death.

Another alien, a Givin - their natural talent for juggling numbers in their head made them instinctive navigators, this one wore a breath mask and eye shields.

Another human male, in a robe similar to his leader's, but covering a lot more bone and muscle. Put him next to Mirannon, and there would only be a haircut in it. He was certainly armed as well - there was more of him to hide it on - but he looked more as if he preferred bare hands and brute force.

The last two were both female, a robed one and a - the species was impossible to tell. Humanoid, bright-metal hands, neck and head, maybe more than that but hidden by a naval pilot's uniform, moving as machine-like as the cybermask and limbs suggested, and being supported by the other.

Going through the motions, Adannan was introducing the com/scan officer when the other woman pushed her hood back. Dordd's heart stood still for a moment. How had she got there?

The living double - clone sister, must be - of his own (he wished) Aleph-3, what was she, her clone, doing amid this damaged, deranged crew? As swift on the uptake as her sister, she noticed his attention; so did Adannan. His expression was unreadable, but Dordd knew he had just landed himself in it.

Captain Dordd had barely moved in, still hadn't finished unpacking. It was no great personal misery to offer Adannan his main suite in the terraces of the superstructure, and move in to the day cabin on a permanent basis.

Apart from the symbolism of it. As expected, Adannan invited him to join him in what were now the Private Secretary's Chambers.

It was almost more worrying not to see the collection of freaks waiting for him. The honour guard from his own crew looked severely scared, but the only people immediately visible were the robed three, the huge thug, her, and Adannan himself.

She looked good in a black robe - would in anything. Is she the second prong of the trident? Here to distract and threaten, flank and pounce? Concentrate, he told himself Adannan is the main threat, isn't he?

'Kor Adannan, I would like to say that I'm flattered by the Privy Council's attention, but the simple fact is, I don't understand it. This is my first command; we haven't had time to distinguish ourselves.' Or disgrace ourselves, he thought privately.

'Precisely.' Adannan said, like a scalpel. 'It is with ISD Black Prince that the privy council is concerned.'

'Then-' The thug glared at him. Dordd ignored it, but paused anyway. He had been about to say 'why the indirect approach' when his brain caught up with his mouth.

'Good.' Adannan said. His people understood, the naval captain didn't. That meant that he appreciated a subordinate who thought slowly enough to be no threat, but quickly enough to be at least useful.

Dordd thought very fast nonetheless, of what it would be safe and unsafe to say. What in sanity's name had Lennart gone and done, that the Privy Council itself sent a hatchet-man to take care of him?  
What looked very much like one of Vader's followers, at that - a licensed force wielder, exempt from the anti-Jedi legislation. And a whole raft of other things. My best bet, he thought, is probably to play it straight, as if I know nothing. Space, I don't.

'If you don't mind me asking, Kor Adannan, what brought Captain Lennart to the notice of the Privy Council?'

'He displayed potential.' The heavyweight said, his master's mouthpiece.

'He has come across a dangerous and complex situation we feel he needs…support and reassurance in his handling of.' Adannan himself said. 'As his right hand man for five years, you should know him well.'

'Left hand man.' Dordd said. 'Chief Mirannon is his right arm.' Dordd tried to disclaim involvement.

'That fact was not known to the Privy Council.' Adannan lied. 'I am fascinated by the achievements of the ship, and how they reflect on the individuals involved. It is the people, and their ability to rise - or fall - that matters to us.'

'Jorian Lennart,' the clone sister said, tormenting him with the name of his rival, 'is an enigma. His service record makes no sense. He should have been promoted long ago, for his abilities, or dismissed long ago, for his irregularities.'

'The squadron Black Prince is part of has one of the lowest personnel turnovers in the Starfleet.' Dordd wondered how to explain it in acceptable political jargon. 'They display to an exceptional degree the virtues of solidarity, adaptability-'

'Indeed.' Adannan said. 'I am intrigued,' in a tone that suggested "intrigued" was a euphemism for "am about to schedule for dissection", 'with the statistically absurd fortune that has attended Black Prince. She was not named for Lord Vader, was she?'

'No, it's a traditional warship name in the Tion Cluster.' Named for a historical, or this far downstream on the river of time largely legendary, figure, similarly renowned for a near-uncontrollable temper. Dordd had the sense not to add that part.

'She has received extraordinarily little attention for a ship of her combat record. There are only three line destroyers in the entire galactic fleet who have a majority claim to a capital ship kill. The Swiftsure is now assigned to the Royal Guard, the Leviathan so badly damaged her number was retired and the hulk replaced Carida's missing mascot moon. Lennart's ship is the third.' The special assistant to the privy councillor thought he had to tell the career naval officer that?

'If all that was at stake was the recognition that deserves, you wouldn't need to be here, would you?' Dordd replied.

'Correct. There is a purpose, which he would suit. Captain Lennart is, however…unpredictable. Eccentric, even.' Adannan stated, with a certainty he couldn't possibly be obtuse enough to believe. 'Central authority must be upheld; If I approached him directly, it is possible he would do something rash.'

'You expect he would be less likely to do something crazy in the face of a Starfleet ship commanded by a former member of his own command team, fine - but what would make him want to do that? How terrible is this purpose?' Dordd asked.

'How terrible can it be,' the clone sister said, 'if an arm of the Privy Council is carrying it through?' Which was not much of an answer, but to challenge it was probably more than he could get away with.

'Tell me more about the incident.' Adannan said. There was only one he could mean.

'It was just before my time, but I heard all about it, and we flew it again in sim - trying to work out how Black Prince had got away with it.' Dordd said, and proceeded to tell the tale.

Two Procurator-class battlecruisers, the Faber and the Palmus Viridis; the Viridis had spent most of her life laid up, she was over eleven hundred years old, part of Kuat's defence force.

Come the Clone Wars, she had been recommissioned with a cursory survey, and the first major refit she had come due for post-war had found the hull frames and reactor vessel severely cracked and corroded. It was deemed uneconomic to repair her, and Viridis was scheduled to be broken up and components recycled to refit the hundred and twenty year old Faber.

Black Prince was there both as part of the guard force for the deepdock and to lend support from the engineering team.

They were not alone - the Alliance had decided to stick their oar in; relatively new formed, but already picking up the pieces of older revolts and running discontents.

A distress signal from a supply convoy on route to the dock; Lennart had treated it with the dubiety he alone had thought it deserved, pretended to answer it, made some distance towards it - then sprinted flat out back to the dock complex.

He had arrived in time to catch the Rebel strikeforce as it was deploying; an old Recusant, two Corellian frigates - a 9600 and a Mushroom - a pair of Dreadnoughts, and transports containing two full Corps' worth of renegade PDF soldiers from a world that had decided to cast its lot against the Empire.

Now that was shipjacking in style.

Black Prince managed to nail two of the transports before being swarmed over by the Rebels; she had to turn to beat off the strike escort before dealing with the situation at the dock.

Dordd's predecessor had died when the mushroom rammed the destroyer in the forward superstructure; it had been gutted by HTL fire, it was only the wreck that hit; that was enough.

The Recusant was crippled and brushed aside with no time to finish it off, one of the Dreadnoughts and the 9600 obliterated, the other Dread limping away with the Recusant.

By then, the remaining six divisional transports were docked and their troops running riot through the deepdock and the battlecruisers.

Lennart blew one of the transports out of the way, docked on the Faber and released the legion; most of the engineering detail ashore - six thousand including Mirannon - had retreated into the Faber's engineering spaces and were holding out there.

Black Prince's stormtrooper complement had been the 276th Armoured Legion during the Clone Wars; renumbered when assigned to the Starfleet, they had managed to keep most of the heavy equipment.

There were few spaces inside a Procurator where it was worth trying to fly a repulsortank, but dismounted secondary cannon and repeating blasters, there was more than enough need for.

Veterans, a high proportion of clones, with heavy weapons and a team of crack engineers rigging the battleground in their favour; three to one odds became almost manageable, especially with Mirannon's irradiating, squashing and accelerating to death the three self-proclaimed 'Jedi' leading the attack.

They had just linked up and were starting to turn the tide when the rest of the rebels managed to release the Viridis from the dock. Two corps-level boarding actions and an escaping, hijacked battlecruiser; it was certainly an interesting life in the Imperial Starfleet.

Lennart started juggling plates at this point, leaving most of the transports and dropships by the Faber, and pursuing the Viridis with the Black Prince and the fighter wing.

Palmus Viridis' fighter complement had been removed and reassigned, so the strike wing had free range.

Most of the rebel soldiers had limited verging on no cross-training as ship crew, and the real turning point of the action was probably when a short-interval ripple salvo from the port side HTL turrets blasted through the back of the Viridis' bridge module. That killed off most of the rebel officers who actually were capable of handling a ship the size of a battlecruiser.

The fighters exploited that, taking precision potshots, racing the rebels to disable shields, engines and weapons before they could be brought fully on line from the emergency positions lower in the hull; Black Prince continued a distant fire, blasting pieces off the battlecruiser's engines, but also firing mainly LTL into the Faber, hitting the rebel controlled spaces, lending fire support to the legion.

Once they had started to win - and the legion's veterans were simply faster thinking, faster reacting, as well as better armed; they couldn't use any of the available biologicals and chemicals, too many unsuited engineers on their side, but everything else was fair game.

Once the tide had turned, Lennart withdrew a strike team.

Unskilled but enthusiastic, the rebels on board the Palmus Viridis did have enough wit to return fire, and a ship the size of a Procurator - four and a half times the length, eighty times the mass of a mere destroyer - was not short of guns to do that with.

Taking out the bridge had bought time, but the secondary control positions were too deeply buried; the chances of being able to pound the giant battlecruiser into submission before the hijackers managed to jump away were minimal.

A full scale boarding action - also out of the question. Even if they had the time to transfer over, they couldn't do six to one against. Three, maybe, but not both ships and the dock.

A sabotage team, then; a handful of engineers and stormtroopers to disrupt it, hack into local control and do enough damage, cause enough chaos to slow the ship down, buy enough time for Black Prince to find and exploit a real weakness.

Black Prince was firing more slowly, taking aimed shots at the edges of shield panels, hosing the Viridis' gun turrets with LTL fire so that when they opened a shield window to shoot out, hopefully there would be a bolt coming in. Raw firepower was never going to be enough, but a scalpel might.

Port battery scored again; from aft forward, aiming at the superstructure beneath the ruined bridge, a ripple salvo, one gun after the other, twentieth of a second apart. If they couldn't find a weakness, they would make one.

Pounding on the same two meter wide square of shield, extraordinary shooting - Lennart had to hold the Black Prince rock steady, she picked up scars from that, nearly losing her own command module - it fluctuated, flared; local burn through.

Bolt after bolt burned into the Viridis' cortex, splashing hull aside, shearing deep wounds- not mortal, but enough for a landing party to exploit.  
Viridis banked to hide the wound, slowly; Lennart was guessing, accurately as it turned out, that whoever was in charge after the bridge had been shredded was a junior or staff officer, head full of the naval history most academies stuffed their students with. No reflexes - they could work out what the right thing to do was, but they took an age thinking of it.

The sabotage team knew they probably weren't coming back; they went anyway. An assault shuttle - more likely to survive what would be essentially a controlled crash - sprinting through the defensive fire, crunching into the wreckage, disembarking the volunteers for death.  
They were at least semi-prepared - they chemical-bombed and bioshot their way to the main damage control centre enthusiastically enough there was a good chance the ship would be too contaminated to retrieve anyway.

Heavy casualties - under the circumstances, acceptable. Only half a dozen made it - that was enough.

The survivors managed to hack in - central overrides to stop them were vapourised with the bridge module - and shut down the Palmus Viridis' tensor field.

No-one would ever know the full story; some panicky idiot in the Alliance ranks tried to blast them out with a thermal detonator - killed them, took out the control linkage.

Any authorised terminal could undo the damage, if there was a sufficiently skilled slicer to hand with enough presence of mind to do it. There wasn't.

After that, all there was to do was fly an S-curve, swaying back and forward across the battlecruiser's stern, firing ripples from each main battery alternately.

Overtaxing and crushing shield generators without the elasticity of their mounts to rely on, leaving guns unable to shoot back without their turrets being smashed by their own no-longer-buffered recoil, hits sending showers of shrapnel through the ship killing the people needed to put it back together. Each failure straining the systems, making it ripe for more - then, once the aft quarter was thoroughly shredded, coherent full salvoes, burning huge killing chasms deep in the hull.

Com chaos; thousands of signals, pleas for mercy, spurious surrenders, defiance, incoherent babble - on the fourth full salvo, the battlecruiser's reactor ruptured.

Sector fleet had thought they were doing well to catch and kill a crippled Recusant and Dreadnaught; they simply could not believe it when they arrived to pick up the pieces, and found an expanding cloud that had formerly been a capital ship and a limping, battered destroyer claiming the kill.

There was some doubt, some disbelief - far from being praised, Lennart only narrowly avoided being court-martialled on a variety of crimes, basically failing to be in two places at once, and worse, embarrassing the sector group. After all the fuss, he decided not to file an official claim for recapturing the Faber as well.

Dordd finished the tale; the three hooded figures looked as if they barely believed it.

'He's the man.' The bulky, robed human said; Dordd was still surprised that he actually knew how to talk.

'Against an old ship and a scratch crew? Circumstances were in his favour.' She said.

'In achieving the seemingly impossible, that often turns out to have been the case.' Adannan cautioned. 'The opening phase. How did he come to disregard a warning that by all the rules and regulations he was bound to heed? The supply convoy was a safer and more practical target for the rebels, there was no reason to disregard it.'

'I've seen him do so on other occasions- tactics, experience, partly, I think, intuition.' All three of the robed figures noticed that.

'Partly, also, I think he enjoys risk to a degree, sometimes he follows chances that are simply too thin for comfort - he's not infallible. His hit rate is well above average, but occasionally we do draw blanks, spend months combing barren void.'

They had tuned him out and were trading significant looks among themselves. They seemed to reach consensus.

'You will take this ship to Vineland sector, to rendezvous with the Black Prince.' Adannan said.

'Of course, Private Secretary - and after that?' Dordd asked.

Adannan considered his options. Dordd's co-operation might make this business run more smoothly. He could always be disposed of, or treated as an example, later.

'The Privy Council', he lied, 'has a use for the only destroyer captain still below Admiral's rank with a capital ship kill claim to his credit. The council also has uses for a man who knows how to defy standing orders, work the system, and act on his own initiative. The fact that those two happen to be one and the same makes it all the more anomalous that he has escaped attention thus far. We intend to praise him, not bury him.'

Dordd was nowhere near as oblivious as Adannan was giving him credit for. Every instinct he possessed, for man-management and navy politics, was screaming at him that something was, very seriously, wrong.

He was desperately trying not to think about it too hard. 'I see.' He said, innocuously.

'I hope you do, Captain. Best speed to Vineland sector.' Adannan looked at the door, clearly meaning the captain was dismissed.

Dordd was grateful to get out.

Adannan sat motionless for a few moments. His team knew that meant he was thinking.

'He seemed very taken with you.' He said to his female aide and acolyte.

'Thinking of turning an accident into an opportunity, my lord?' she smiled back, hiding her nervousness. Adannan was not a galaxy-bestriding titan, like their ultimate master, but that was in some ways worse; he aspired, and imitated.

His entourage consisted of an uneasy, damaged blend of favourite victims and co-conspirators, and it was frighteningly easy to make the downward change. For the moment, she was one of the priviledged.

'…Yes.' the sith acolyte decided. 'Torment him a little. Then, just to see how he reacts to it, tell him the truth.'

'By your will, my lord.' She gave the formal reply, then 'How much of the truth?'

'Use your own judgement.' He said, cruelly.

Dordd, walking away, was kicking himself for staring at her - but what was Aleph-3, or one of her clone sisters, doing there? Among the Empire's dirty work squad?

Mainly, he was thinking of what in space they were supposed to do. Did he have time to train his men, even? The curse of hyperdrive - short journey times that left little chance for any meaningful maintenance, damage control or training along the way.

Prioritise. At best, they were going to be acting in support of a fleet destroyer - at worst, depending on how unusual things got, conceivably, against.

That would be - suicidal. Even on the same side, the best use Black Prince would have for this ship would be as bait, or spare parts.

In general, combat; fine, but what? The Arrogant-class were actually less agile than the Imperators - faster in a straight line, but less good at the footwork.

Survivability first, then, see what difference practise made to that, and no reason why the gun crews couldn't be busy at the same time, if not at long then at least medium range. He was still on his way to the bridge when he heard footsteps behind him.

It was her; his mouth went dry, he started to ask what she was doing following him.

'I, ah…' she said, mock-shyly, 'you looked at me there as if you knew me.'

'I thought I did.' Dordd said, looking at the robes. 'Or at least your identical twin.' Yet now he was face to face with her, he noticed differences; this one, whatever her name was, was rounder faced, fuller figured, fleshier. Stop it, he thought, not listening to himself.

'A twin? What was her name?' she teased him.

Dordd couldn't think of a snappy comeback in time. 'Aleph-3.'

'Ah, the white sheep of the family.' The aide said. 'Was she older? Younger?' It was nice to have a toy of her own to play with; start with simple embarrassment and work up to misery and torment.

'The same age, surely? She explained to me about your, um, birth.'

'Oh, we were a very late series. The Geonosians learned a lot since the original J-model, in particular not to go too heavy on the stabilisers, especially for a line which was supposed to be, shall we say inventive? We're more like milluplets.' She said. It was more or less true - they had been given room to develop. Some in the most surprising directions.

'Is that what you do for Kor Adannan, then? Public relations?' Dordd asked.

'Do you think that's what he needs?' she said, scornfully. 'Someone to stand up and lie for him?'

'He's political, isn't he? I'm sure he does from time to time.' Dordd said, surprising himself with where he was going. He didn't want to be hostile to her, for more than one reason.

She changed the subject, so drastically it spoke of an underlying agenda asserting itself, even to him.

'Is that what my sister does for Jorian Lennart? Tell me more about her.'

'She is…leaner than you. Possibly the only person in the galaxy who can make stormtrooper armour look sexy.'  
'She's still doing that, then?' the woman in front of him felt offended - by his failure to flatter her, and by his attentions to her sister. Either way, he couldn't win. 'Never moved on, never followed her star?'

'You don't think being an elite trooper is enough?' Dordd asked.

'No, I don't. She is either refusing to rise, or thinks she had found another way.'

'Rise to what?'

'Power, of course.' The robed woman said, as if she was speaking to an idiot.

'I don't think that's Aleph-3's main motivation - and before you say "more fool her" -' the clone sister in front of him had indeed been about to - 'think, and tell me what price you bought your status at.'

'Something of Captain Lennart has rubbed off on you after all.' She snapped back.

'Any decent person would say the same.' Dordd said, guts churning and wondering what his idiot mouth was up to. 'I know there's a growing trend that Imperial officers aren't supposed to be decent people these days, but your lord has at least two actual slaves in his entourage. Does he really think he can ignore the law, or is that a silly question- and is that your definition of power?'

'Are you actually trying to challenge the authority of an officer of the privy council? Do you have that much of a death wish?'

'If you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said no. Where does he get this untouchability from?' Dordd asked, meaning - why does the privy council trust him?

'He's an adept. The rules change for him.' She admitted.

'To what? Get away with anything, except failure?' Dordd replied.

'Essentially. And you, fire this through your own head; for his tricks and outright defiance of procedure, Captain Jorian Lennart is, by rights, a dead man. He badly needs a 'get out of dreck free' card.'

'That's why Adannan was making such a big deal about his instincts…' Dordd made the mental connection.

'Latent, untrained force ability. Something that is simply not allowed to survive in the wild. I believe the standard text runs, "join us or die." ' she stated.

'Hold on. Even assuming you're right, that you aren't simply starting at shadows, a crew with a strong, close-kint loyalty and a major warship kill - what exactly do you need them for?'

Dordd demonstrated how far common, unaided intuition could stretch. He continued 'Or should that be who? How loyal is Adannan? Who's above him, that he might want a way to step into the shoes of?'

'Very good, Captain.' She said, smiling. 'You had best take care; we might decide you have a spark of the Force as well.'


	15. Chapter 15

Neutron Star class auxiliary carrier Great Murzim Stem was, on the inside, fairly well looked after. Surprisingly so for such an inherently worthless hull. They were not fast enough to escape Imperial hunters and, unless radically refitted, didn't have the shields and weapons for a stand up fight with a proper warship.

Like most big civilian ships, their main power trunking went direct from reactor to hyperdrive and ion engines, and their associated systems, stasis, tensor and relative-inertial fields, closely integrated with them. They needed a whole new secondary power system to make any worthwhile percentage of the reactor output usable for combat-credible shields and weapons. Imperial Starfleet protected transports usually relied on local generators; this ship had made an unusually complete job of refit.

Well, it had an entire Clone War era military depot to draw on, so that made sense. Two quad medium turrets, looked taken from an Acclamator, quad light turbolasers on reinforced point defence mounts, cargo space converted to hangar bay, troop space and magazines.

As for the people onboard, there had been a combination celebration and wake, in a borrowed ready room, snatched out of what little time they had.

The clock was running, the plan already under way; the featherweight Quasar Fire would serve as rendezvous and retrieval carrier, the Great Murzim Stem would jump in as assault party leader, most fighters already deployed and what few non-hyper units there were working off this ship.

Now they were just waiting, for the plan to reach a definite shape, for their targets to be chosen and to be briefed on them.

Aron had surprised himself - unpleasantly - by his own jealousy. None of them were indulging in substances, of any form, to any great degree - they would be flying before long; but simple talk was head-bending enough.

There were five raw replacements in the ready room with them, and squadrons did not come in fourteens. Who were the ghosts at the feast?

Grannic was rambling about something, some obscure memory of pioneer life - when one of them asked Aron and Franjia, 'Why? I don't mean why the Rebellion; why did you ever side with the Empire?'

'Fifty-odd million planets, and you try to call them 'the?'' Aron said. 'It isn't all bad everywhere.'

'Get real, Aron, that's like saying a man with cancer's all right apart from the lumpy bits.' Franjia said, aiming for contentiousness, and then appearing to change her mind. 'Then again - maybe you're half right; the people you're trying to free from the Empire, are the people of the Empire.  
'Where do you draw the line between the people and the system? Is it acceptable to shoot janitors? File clerks? Traffic wardens? Teachers?'

'Yes.' one of them - a Y-wing pilot - said. 'Not acceptable - but necessary. '

'Most people find it acceptable to shoot traffic wardens. Now did you see-' M'Lanth tried to head the discussion off.

'So anyone who finds themselves working for the Empire, even picking gum off the street, is under sentence of death, as soon as you can get around to it?' Franjia asked him.

'They want all of us dead, why shouldn't we do the same to them?' he said, looking at Aron and Franjia.

Franjia was about to snap back at him when Grannic looked at him cold-eyed and said 'Because, Neridon, we are supposed to be the good guys.'

'Most of the Imperial Starfleet would say the same thing.' Aron said. 'The thing you forget about Imperial propaganda is that it works. Unless something that screwed up happens right in front of you, you just don't get hit by the clue bat. The pirates and dope-runners I used to chase were genuine scum the galaxy was better off without so, yes, I reckoned I was on the side of right.'

'How? The Empire's murdered and robbed it's way across the galaxy, killed billions-'

'I feel,' M'Lanth looked at Aron and Franjia, 'like going for a walk. Care to join me?'

The argument - if that was what it was; they seemed to be violently agreeing with each other - rumbled on behind them.

So Aron and Franjia went wandering through the ship, 'escorted' by some of their new comrades and a fairly hefty security detail, both to stop them doing anything crazy, and any of the ship's crew going for them.  
After the flight facilities, next stop the magazine.

'We never did decide who got the kill credit for that thing, did we?' Franjia asked Aron, on the way.

'Which thing?' M'Lanth asked.

'A crescent-winged missile attack ship, operating with this as its tender in our, ah, last meeting.' Franjia admitted.

'Squadron attack, team effort.' Aron said, oblivious to the tension, or just ignoring it.

As they got to the magazine hatch, Franjia was just deciding to play with it. 'That is- rather a lot of missile power.' She said, looking in at the ordnance racks. They seemed to have been put together by someone who had seen a lot of war movies, but had more actual experience with builder's scaffolding. Half empty, which still left, at rough count, over two hundred capital concussion rounds.

'At a guess, they lack isolated, dedicated shields and baffles…you know, if I was a double, secretly a real Imperial fanatic,' she said, smiling evilly, 'one or two pistol shots at the ready rack, and they would probably cook off.' She made a little explosion gesture.

The security detail clustered around her, just in case she did do anything that stupid or dangerous.

Aron glared at her. 'Are you trying to get us into trouble?'

'I can't help it, I'm a bomber pilot.' She said. 'Show me a target this good, with a possibility of that satisfying an explosion, I do tend to start frothing.' She said deadpan, as cool and poised as ever.

'You have a point,' M'Lanth admitted, 'but it only worries people when you admit it.'

'The extra internal shielding is keyed to the combat shields.' One of the techies told them. 'When they activate, these do.'

'Dubious.' Franjia said. 'The Alliance doesn't have the intellectual property rights for ambush.'

'By the looks of it, you're short of smaller ordnance.' Aron said, looking further down the cargo racks. 'Have you ever tried slinging one of those-' the heavy missiles- 'under a Y-wing?'

'We get by.' M'Lanth said, sounding determined not to worry. 'Come with me a second.' He led them round two corners and up a level, out of earshot of the ordies.

'I suppose it probably used to annoy you,' he said, 'when you were back there, how all 'Imperials' got lumped together.'

'No,' Aron said. 'It always cheered me up. If they're that dumb, they're probably easy meat.'

'Argh. What am I going to do with you?' M'Lanth said. 'Look; big galaxy, right? What makes you think that the Alliance is any more one solid block than the Empire is?'

'And some of the separate strands that make up the Alliance do not tend to look on the bright side.' Franjia guessed, rightly.

'Yes. Three wings; the political wing - call it the Chandrillian wing for convenience. Former senators, leadership types.'

'Three wings? What, you mean we joined the wrong rebellion? Stang. We're going to have to go back to the empire, defect all over again until we join the right one.' Franjia decided to test his. He ignored it.

'Fallout from power struggles within the Empire.' Aron stated.

'Well, maybe.' M'Lanth said. What else were you supposed to call an ex-Senator, come to think of it? 'But- anyway; then there's the ideological wing, call it the Corellian and Colonial, the guys with some big idea reason why the empire is evil. Corrupt, bureaucratic, restricting individual freedoms, yadda.' He said, smiling to show he didn't mean it.  
'Some of the rimmers have a verbal diarrhoea problem- talk ideological theory till the wampas come home.  
'Then there's the vengefuls, call it the Alderaanian wing. Personally hurt by the Empire and ready to set the galaxy on fire to get back at them. The nonhumans, you can sort out for yourself. The point I'm getting at is that a lot of the people here don't have much of a sense of humour left, if they had it at all to start with.'

'Right. I can understand that, a lot of what the Empire does simply…isn't funny. It must make revolution a pretty miserable business, though.' Aron stated.

'It has its informative side. If, say, Captain Rinpael starts telling blue stories in the wardroom, I know we're in for a rough one. Silliness,' M'Lanth quoted, 'is the last refuge of the doomed, after all.'

'So as long as the command staff are grumbling, bitching, and walking around po-faced, you reckon you're doing not too badly? It had better not work both ways, because on those terms, I don't see how the Empire's supposed to lose.' Aron theorised.

'Once you take the maniacal cackling into account…' Franjia corrected him.

'I'd forgotten about that.' Aron said, then asked M'Lanth, 'Seriously- for the moment- what are you going to do with us? I was a squadron leader, Franjia was already tabbed for the next squadron leader's billet. Now I know we're in no position to make demands, but - what are we going to get to fly, and when?'

'Between us - Galactic Spirit, we've got better than a Wing's worth of kills. Intel, maybe, but if all I wanted was to get out of the firing line and spend all my life answering stupid questions, I wouldn't have bothered running, I'd have put in for a desk job.' Franjia said.

'There are procedures for these things, here. You're probably be going to be passed up the line for further interrogation and investigation. Before or after the fight, I don't know.' M'Lanth said.

'Surely the Alliance's best chance is to take in as many Imperial renegades as it possibly can?' Aron asked, wondering where the Rebel squadron commander hailed from.

'Best chance of- remember those aliens?' he said, almost hissing the last part.

'Congratulations.' Franjia said. 'You're almost as bigoted as the average TIE pilot.' Aron glared at her. If she was acting it, simulating coming out of her shell, being freer and more flippant, well and good- but if it was the stress talking, the situation starting to get to her, that could be a real problem.

'Bad blood's still bad blood, whatever colour it is. The Mon Cal in particular are security fanatics. Cautious, conservative, no…aggression. No killer instinct. Always looking over their shoulder - well, they can, with those eyes. Always looking for a safe, low-risk option.  
'It doesn't kriffing work that way, does it? You take the risks, you suffer the losses, you hope you hurt the other guy worse, and come up swinging next time.' M'Lanth let that go, bitterly.

'Five men down.' Aron said. 'Three of them retrievable, if we get this right - if we,' meaning himself and Franjia, 'are even allowed to take part. I think this is one time the Imperial method has some advantage to it.'

Franjia agreed. 'Backwards, isn't it? The Imperial doctrine, indoctrination, is designed to harden squadrons to endure continuous combat, heartbreakingly heavy losses - and the proportion of units that go through that kind of punishment is tiny.  
'The Rebellion's supposed to be a band of brothers, and yet you're sent into the fire so often that being able to stand it at all starts to look like a triumph in its own right.'

'I think you've started believing our propaganda.' M'Lanth tried to pass it off, nobody believing it.

'How did you come to be here?' Aron asked him.

'Oh, it's crazy. I'm from Antigivaun- you'll never have heard of it. Frontier planet, starting to solidify; twenty-five years ago, we threw in our lot with the Separatists. Fought for them, using a hideous jumble of captured Republican and kitbashed Separatist bits and pieces; good practise for the rebellion.  
'You know those over-and-under darts with the middle ball turret, Nantexes aren't they, the ones they said were too difficult for humans to fly? My dad spent two years trying to prove them wrong. Came out of it thirty percent cyber and three quarters mad.'

'I've sim'd against those.' Franjia said.

'You need to get out more.' Aron bounced back at her.

'You don't think this counts?' she said, plucking at one of the pocket flaps of the Rebel flightsuit. 'Sorry, carry on.'

'The battle line shifted as combat groups chased each other around the Rim, but when it got to us - the Separatist high command hung Antigivaun out to dry. Used us, and abandoned us. No mobile unit reinforcements at all.  
'Not many people from our world have much time for nonhumans. Not after that day. We dropped the planetary shield and made a fight of it, and we lost. Dad survived, just, and after I was spawned-'

'Spawned?' Franjia asked, unbelieving.

'Don't ask. Well, the old man turned into a total anarchist. He took against all forms of being told what to do, actually ran for office on a Don't Listen To The Bastards platform. Most embarrassing day in his life was when they voted him in as mayor…the only way I could rebel against him was to follow in his ion trail.' M'Lanth said.

Franjia looked meaningfully at Aron, trying to convey- I like him. Is he worth breaking cover for?  
Aron shook his head. Things were going to get messy enough, without help.

The sound of clumping feet; a little grey man came round the corner, attended by a squad of Alliance infantry. Tired, drained, grim men. Where does he fit in, Franjia thought. Interrogator on the personal staff of a rogue Imperial official? True believer, willing to sacrifice himself to the cause and erase his own personality? Outer personality, all the wrinkles of character that made a man, burnt off by some personal tragedy, leaving only a job to be got on with?

'Take them.' He said, gesturing at Franjia and Aron. The infantry moved out into a firing crescent, the two outermost came forward with binders.

'Wait. What's your authority? Who sanctioned this?' M'Lanth shouted at them.

'Captain Ibtilamte. Strike group leader.' The little grey man said.

'They're Starfighter Group's problem.'

'As you would know if you understood these things,' the grey-faced interrogator said, 'they have not yet been accepted into the Alliance. They are to be taken for further investigation.'

Franjia and Aron were wondering whether to make a run for it. The troops looked more than willing to shoot them.

'You little grey shit, you cannot do this. Secret police, are you now - that's against everything the Alliance stands for.' M'Lanth ranted at him. The squad pointed their guns at him too.

'The Alliance chiefly stands for not being ground down by the Empire. Precautions are essential. Stand aside.'

'No.' M'Lanth opened his mouth to shout for help; they shot him. Stun, but still - Aron and Franjia looked at him, unbelieving.

'You're an ISB plant, aren't you? Here to stop the Rebellion getting anything useful out of Imperial defectors.' Aron guessed.

'Hold your hands out in front of you.' The grey man said, unimpressed. In fact, he was seriously offended that anyone should think he belonged to that bunch of amateur clowns, when he actually took his orders from Infiltration branch of the Bureau of Operations. Naturally, he didn't show it. 'Three seconds.'

Both the pilots decided they had a better chance of getting out of this if they weren't comatose; waited two and a half seconds, just for face's sake, held their hands out, had them bound. They were taken to a docking port.

Tramp freighters were, in some ways, the perfect weapon for the Alliance; fast, much larger than a fighter and that much tougher in proportion, power output to match so they could stand heavier weapons and shields, not needing much in the way of resources to customise, and 'cargo' translated frighteningly easily to 'troop capacity' - or ordnance, for that matter.

Usually considered capable of unescorted flight, this one was the courier, carrying information - like the attack plan - back to higher authority, whatever could not be trusted to long distance transmissions. And them. Three guards boarded the freighter with them - no sight from the airlock, on the inside it seemed YT.

'Any bright ideas about how to get out of this?' Aron asked Franjia.

'Short of my seducing the pilot, or your suddenly manifesting force powers, no.'

'Shut up.' The guard opposite them said. He looked barely sixteen, apart from the eyes.

'How many fights have you been in, kid?' Aron - early twenties - asked him.

'Not enough to die. Yet.' Which made a sort of sense, at least.

The freighter detached, banked away, accelerated, jumped to hyperspace. The guards were intending to take shifts - that probably meant a long, slow trip, through poorly mapped space with low-confidence routes and maps.

And low-confidence engineering. If there had been anything seriously wrong with the ship, it wouldn't have flown at all, but it was amazing how many minor gripes they could keep going with.

Aron and Franjia were busy annoying the guard with an extended commentary on each and every little creak, shudder, twing, clunk and pinking noise - it was working - when there was a shuddering thud, scraping off a cliff judders and noise.

The lights and life support flickered, the ship jerked straight 'down' then pitched as if a space elephant had sat on its starboard quarter.

Aron and Franjia managed to hang on to the seat, the young guard got it wrong - tried to hold on to his gun - and briefly ended up on the ceiling, before crashing to the deck as the AG came back into alignment, with at least one bone broken.

'We weren't that rude, were we?' Franjia asked. 'Crash transition?'

'Probably.'

Both of them headed for the cockpit - stopped by a pair of stun bolts blasting close over their heads. They looked at each other.

'Why didn't you steal his gun?' Aron asked Franjia.

'I thought you were the natural thief. Shh.'

The cockpit door was open, and they could hear incoming com traffic; '-Alliance Starfighter Corps. You're holding two of ours. Release them at once.'

'Popularity. Joy.' Aron grumbled. Both of them ducked as another shot seared the padding on the bulkhead above them; she went back for the disabled guard's blaster.

The guard protecting the cockpit started down the short, angled corridor towards Aron; Aron dived forwards and tackled him, both of them tumbling to the ground before he could get a shot off. Aron was faster getting up, springing to his feet and kicking the rebel soldier in the head. Not the best move - his helmet took most of it, the pilot yelped as he broke a toe, the guard rolled over, dazed, and knocked Aron off the one foot he had on the ground. They went down in another tangled heap, and the freighter's flight engineer came back out of the cockpit, pistol in hand, took no chances and stun-shot them both.

Franjia had seized the other guard's rifle, came back to see that and put a stun bolt into the flight engineer's throat. He collapsed, choking, larynx scorched and fighting for breath. The cockpit door started to hiss shut - her second shot went into the door control panel, jamming it.

The pilot started to stand up to turn on her, the com system said, again, 'Heave to, this is the Alliance Starfighter Corps. Cease acceleration, release our people, or-'

That was as far as Comran got. Franjia could see part of the cockpit window, and what she saw out of it was a bright flash then a big, fast blur, red and parchment - yellow and white and chrome, all with freckles of carbon.

'I think you'll find,' Captain Lennart's voice cut across the Rebel TBS, 'that they're our people. Run or die, your choice.'

The rebel squadron panicked briefly; a Star Destroyer suddenly appearing in their midst was usually a bowel-loosening sight. 'Shuttle, get the kriff out. With me, hit the scanner domes.' M'Lanth ordered - bold and utterly dumb. Against a Lancer, it had been a viable strategy - against an Imperator, less sensible.

'Don't just stand there, do some pilot stuff.' Franjia snapped at the transport pilot. 'Get us out of here.' She was using her command voice, and it worked; he turned his back on her.

A momentary hesitation - right, which side am I on? She asked herself.

She didn't want Comran M'Lanth to get killed. Was that wrong? Un-Imperial? Fair fight maybe, but twelve to one, with him only sticking his neck out on her account - no. She was probably a better pilot than the Rebel shuttle jockey; either way - she shot him in the back of the head.

Stun bolts were non-lethal, and that was about the best that could be said for them. A stunshot to the head could seem like - or in some species, including some human variants, induce - an epileptic fit.

She stepped over the twitching body, into the pilot's seat. Right, multi-engined, not a theoretical problem; effectively doing this one handed, worse. She throttled up and started to bring the freighter round in a sweeping curve, clumsily-throttles and yoke, fine, but only one at a time.

Looking out - at least Alpha, Gamma and Delta were airborne, the attack on the destroyer was already a failure - the Rebels were starbursting, scattering to avoid the swarm of defending fighters. Two were well out of it, a pair of Y's just drifting there - that had been the rescue plan. Droid piloted, ready for them to step into. Another two were down already, a Y and an X, both ejected, she saw with relief. What she should be doing was heading for Black Prince's hangar bay; going home.

Instead - she held the freighter to a loose evasive weave and watched, fascinated, as she identified M'Lanth's X-wing being challenged directly by Group Captain Olleyri. The Defender came in on the X-wing's port bow high; M'Lanth started to turn towards it, the Defender rolled outwards -

M'Lanth reversed roll, expecting Olleyri to turn in on his tail - instead Olleyri retro-burned hard, pitched the other way, outguessed M'Lanth and ended up behind him - the rebel immediately reversed turn and pitched up, curving to his left breaking across the gunsights of the Defender.

Olleyri was having too much fun to put a quad burst into the X-wing and end it there and then. Single fire, he bracketed the X-wing, ahead, behind, left, right - M'Lanth faked reversing the turn then pulled up sharply, still in the same tight powered skidding spiral.

Olleyri pirouetted the big, expensive fighter outwards to buy distance and scorched the X-wing again, neat quad bracket, at long range.

M'Lanth's wingman tried to interfere, rolling out and heading after Olleyri - it would be down to the atomic clocks which of Lead, Alpha, got to him first. No help there.

The rebel recognised that fighter for fighter, he was outclassed; as pilot versus pilot, probably there too.

The only edge he had was his opponent's age - skill and guile, true, but also slower reflexes, and that much deeper dyed in arrogance. A knife fight would suit - rolling round each other at point blank range, if Olleyri would give that to him.

The big Defender was fishtailing to kill velocity; it suited the Group Captain's sense of drama too.

M'Lanth's X-wing broke out of its bank and rolled to present, drifting away from the Imperial fighter; Olleyri accelerated towards him, M'Lanth tried to draw a bead with a torp,

Olleyri danced out of the lock once, let the rebel nearly succeed again, nearing optimum firing range - M'Lanth firewalled his engines, launched the torp on a weak contact, and rolled out to strafe past Olleyri's fighter then J-turn and match velocities.

Good timing in principle, but it lacked surprise. Olleyri nailed the torpedo at medium range, accelerated and curved into M'Lanth's line of flight, crossing his sights too fast, twisting like an eel out of the rebel's snatched-trigger stream of fire.

Chopping into a reversing roll and vectoring round, then it was the rebel's turn to dance as the Group Captain lobbed a deliberate stream of single shot after him.

One connected between the wings, smashing into the shielding, dropping it and kicking the X-wing aside; M'lanth rode into the tumble, exaggerating it and turning it into a radical evasive roll.

Olleyri waited for him to pull out of it into an offensive move; which he did, dumping weapon energy to shields and accelerating towards the group captain, cancelling lateral velocity into a long, slashing spiral, rolling round Olleyri's gunsight.

A Defender had more energy to use than an X-wing, and the Group Captain saw no reason not to have fun with it, he kept up a slow fire.

M'Lanth rode his curve, pulling it in, widening it out as need be to dodge.

Distance and judgement; M'Lanth shot off a rapid eight round volley to force Olleyri to evade, not with any realistic expectation of a hit but to buy time for the close, swirling terminal approach the Rebel wanted. He called the turn short, would have flashed across the Defender's nose in perfect killing position, but he had guessed right.

Olleyri overanalysed, began to react too cerebrally and too soon, rolling wide, yo-yo'ing after a rebel that simply wasn't there.

When he realised he had been tricked the Defender flashed round like a conjuring trick, pivoting on the thrust deflectors, and both took full salvos, point blank.

The Rebel's shields dropped completely and one of the bolts connected in the fuselage; nothing fell off, at least not yet. Olleyri's fighter retained some shielding, but the Rebel refused to break off, spun low and left, nose coming up, flying almost backwards tracking the Defender; it rolled out and extended past him, and spun, spraying a hose of fire back along its line of flight which forced M'lanth in turn to break radically, and bought time for Olleyri to retrieve and plan.

The rest of the action had more or less come to a pause, both sides' people flying with one eye on their own business and one eye on the duel.

Franjia barely registered Delta squadron lining up on her, but when she did threw the tramp freighter into a Tallon roll out of sheer reflex, throwing most of them off and cursing herself half way through — it was the perfect excuse.

She decided to extend out and let them try to 'get' her, if they could - partly because she had no intention of giving in, even to her own side, easily.

Then the third guard, the one they had forgotten about, pushed the muzzle of his blaster pistol against her ear. Sithspawn, she thought. I never did think much of Delta's gunnery.

Olleyri and M'Lanth were still fencing with each other. The rest of the rebels were either ejected, ionised, or dead - and no surprise with two squadrons of Avengers chasing them down.

He must have known the engagement was pure loss, the end came surprisingly swiftly - he shut down lasers and dumped the power into shielding, fired a pair of torps at point blank on an incomplete lock.

The Group Captain was slowing, but not there yet; he snapshot at the torpedoes and hit one of them, the explosion cooked off the other, the Defender went tumbling away flare-scorched, the blast caught the X-wing and it started to break up - M'Lanth and his droid ejected. One of the ATRs moved in to pick him up.

Delta had finally coned and paralysed the YT; Franjia could have avoided any one of them, maybe any three, but not the full pack on a coordinated fire order.

One of the search and rescue ATRs moved in on it, attached itself to the starboard lock; for once, Omega-17-Blue had lost the draw and one of the line platoons had got the job instead.

It opened - the single remaining guard was there, using Franjia as a human shield, blaster pistol to her head.  
'Let me go - or I'll splatter this treacherous cow's brains all over the airlock.'

It had taken years for Lennart to get it through their Mandalorian-influenced skulls that bluff was an acceptable weapon of war. He was astonished when the stormtroopers stopped coming at him; pretty much anything they said would have got an 'eh?'

'So what will you do then?' The sergeant asked. 'Assuming we care about taking either of you alive. You're not a flier. If we do let you go, how do you intend to get away?'

Unobtrusively, the trooper at the rear of the squad activated a flash-bang, rolled it forward along the deck while the sergeant held the rebel's attention.

He boggled, decided 'I'll take her with me as a hostage.' Then the blinding flash and the deafening crunch, almost too loud to hear.

Franjia dropped, more out of the grenade's effect than tactics, faster than he did; the sargeant and the two lead troopers put eight blaster bolts into his chest before - after eight bolts, what was left of him - hit the ground.

It was as routine as paperwork in the Imperial fleet; after the battle, the inquisition.

Aron and Franjia were given the once over by Medical - fusing the bone in his toe and removing several items of biofragmentation from her - uncuffed, allowed to change into Starfighter Corps uniform. That sent a wave of rumours scattering throughout the ship from Epsilon flight bay.

Then they were hauled up before the 'intelligence committee' - Brenn, Olleyri still in his flight suit, someone neither of them recognised in a ranker's uniform and steward's insignia, Pellor Aldrem hanging on to Jhareylia as if her sanity depended on it, and the Captain.

Lennart began. 'I think we can infer,' he said, 'from the Alliance Starfighter Command trying to rescue you from their own intelligence services, that your mission was not an unqualified success?'

'Sir,' Aron said, 'as far as it was necessary at all, we did our part. They were thinking along those lines already, all we really did was encourage them.'

'Assuming this hasn't blown it wide open.' Franjia added.

'None escaped, no transmissions got past our jamming. Are you saying you regret being rescued?' Brenn said, harshly.

'Relax, Iel.' Lennart said. 'Time is with us on this one. They're committed, they can't afford to abort; even the loss of their recon squadron is one of those last minute screw-ups that has to be borne.  
'We do know about the escape, and the preliminary strike- taking out the ISB building should cripple the security preparations nicely; the forewarning relatively unimportant, the practical damage more than makes up for it - who was responsible for that?'

'Me, Sir.' Aron admitted. 'It just…sort of happened.'

Lennart had to work at not laughing. 'This is completely informal, in case you were wondering. It has to be, because that 'happening' put a hundred thousand credit bounty on your head. As soon as we work out a good way of disguising the situation as a hypothetical, I intend to inform the fleet legal department, just to see what kind of fit they throw.' He nodded to Olleyri.

'We know all about the operation you took part in. What else have they got, and how good are they?' Olleyri asked.

'We never really got much further than general initiation and indoctrination. They - they're almost entirely like us.' Franjia said.

'As people or as pilots?' the Group Captain asked.

'Mediocre, sir.' Franjia answered. 'Line unit level on average, with a large proportion of novices and a few crack pilots.'

'Mostly crazed.' Aron filled in. 'Pretty grim bunch, the bulk of them. Thirteen squadrons, Y-wings, T-wings, not many X or better, only two frigates, a –40 and a Neutron Star.'

'That X-jockey was pretty good. As long as that isn't their average standard.'

'Is Squadron Leader M'Lanth going to live?' Franjia asked.

'Not once we execute him, no.' Lennart deadpanned.

'But - he came after us, tried to rescue us from their Intel - is that worth killing him over?' she pleaded.  
'You have it backwards. Is it enough to buy him mercy? You were with them for a short but intense period; long enough to make 'them' start to seem like 'us'.' Lennart said.

Brenn was not that much of a hard-liner, but circumstances left him playing the part. 'We sent two officers of the Starfighter Corps undercover, to acquire intelligence and spread disinformation. You are now back where you belong. Anything that happened in between was the demands, and stresses, of the job. Nothing more.'

' "What was done, has been done for the good of the State…" ' Lennart quoted. 'Hathren?'

'I received an - urgent, imperative - signal to exfiltrate, act as guide and local liaison for an assault team, target to be the planetdef V-150's. Take what I could from here and run, consider myself blown.' The ex-rebel agent said.

'Did you get the impression that they would be prepared to go in without you?'

She paused for a second, trying to think it through and sum it up simply, and settled on 'Yes.' Dead-voiced. Aldrem squeezed her arm, he worried about her.

'Very well, then. Rebel assets?'

'Sir, we were under suspicion by everyone but the squadron from the moment we got there. Neither ourselves or the squadron were briefed on the final attack plan, so I can only tell you what we saw.' Aron said, and detailed what he had seen.

Franjia and Captain Lennart both picked up on the attempt to spare the rebel pilots interrogation, at least; Lennart decided not to pursue that, yet.

'Your opinion?' The Captain asked Jhareylia.

'This would have bypassed me completely. I didn't do volume discounts.' She tried to make a joke of it, chiefly to lighten her own mood- and failed to convince. 'They're committed, now.'

'And their standard procedure would be?' Lennart pressed.

'With an escape this size, subtlety fails. I'd expect it to be done as a military rescue, cram them into a warship fast enough to outrun Imperial pursuers and try to cross enough organisational boundaries that the chase flounders in paperwork, reach a safe base then screen them and reintegrate them.'

Ignoring paperwork was one of this ship's chief assets; even assuming that the rebels got that far.

'This,' Lennart said, firing up the holodisplay, 'is what I expect to happen.' They weren't really here to participate, they were here to be used as a sounding board and error checker.  
'The object of the exercise is to draw out enough of the Alliance fleet to make a proper fight of it. System defence has been noticeably slack about long range scans before; I think they would take the risk-'

'The force commander's Mon Cal.' Aron interrupted. 'They're not good at risk.'

'Some destroyer captains would have your lips sewn together for interrupting like that.' Lennart said, calmly.

'Sorry, Sir, what I meant was that the bold move might be beyond them.'

'I believe so too; but is that a safe basis to plan on?' he asked, rhetorically, implying it was the quality rather than the fact of the interruption that mattered.

'So, expectations; the Neutron Star, the fighters and the rest of the human-crewed ships will make a direct entry in low orbit, which triggers whatever spec-ops plans they have; they will need to take the planetary and the capital's theatre shields.  
'I don't expect them to be activated anything like promptly, but I don't expect the rebels to count on that either. No, demolish; they don't have the assets, and I presume aren't stupid enough to assume they'll have the time, to actually steal the generators. Seize the V-150s, bombard or have demolition teams take out the shields, fighter and LTL fire on the prison to kill the defences and guards, then whatever surface to orbit assets they have for retrieval, and as much as possible done at once.  
'I do expect the Mon Cal to be reluctant to make a combat drop; they'll time their exit too soon, end up in high orbit at best, and whether they officially mean to or not act as initial covering party.  
'Does anyone have any objections to the planetary defence force and the Imperial Army receiving a thorough pasting?' Lennart asked.

'No.' Jhareylia said at once.

'What about the Golan?' Aldrem asked.

'I expect them to buy time and raise the alarm to the rest of the sector group, maybe inflict some casualties - better off killing the small craft and slowing down the surface to orbit cycle than just denting the shields of the larger craft.  
'Sector will react, slowly. The Lancer-class Dubhei Targe will be present - in atmosphere, over the prison. The Rebs will, at least should, be hesitant to use heavy weapons on her, for fear of misses - or heat dump off the shielding - roasting the prisoners.

'Kondracke will be able to inflict losses and buy time. When they do nail him, she'll be grounding in a relatively friendly environment with good survival probabilities for her crew. By then, Elstrand's Comarre Meridian should be ready to enter the engagement. The rebels will have already done the majority of the work they need to succeed, and would be far beyond the point of no return.  
'Personally, I hope they do get away with the prisoners; once we recapture them, we can deal with them according to something resembling Imperial law rather than the whim of some mad torturer.' Lennart said.

Franjia had the sense to say nothing; it was Jhareylia who asked 'What does that involve?' She had been about to ask what the difference was when Pel Aldrem stood on her foot.

'Recognising it would take a major legal miracle for any of them to be found actually innocent?' Lennart said. 'Standard drumhead tribunal. Short to medium sentences for the ordinary rank and file and the support personnel, medium to long for the non-coms and officers, long term hard labour to execution for the spiritual-ideological leaders and military planners. All martyr complexes accommodated as usual.

'Ol, this is where you come in. At this point we need rid of the ion cannon ourselves, Elstrand's fighter complement should be going for it, but even taking into account the local defence force, Kondracke and the Golan, they'll be outnumbered at least two, probably three to one.' Lennart explained.

'Captain?' Aldrem spoke up. 'Sir, the Golan's under-crewed for something that size, and as near as makes no odds undefended from boarding. Seize it and they've pretty much got control of local space.'

'I considered that and discounted it. It would take too long for them to clear out, too long to evacuate from; seizing it early in the engagement - it would be a far-sighted man or Mon Cal who saw the need, especially as they intend a smash and grab. The time and troops they'd need, they need more badly elsewhere. Take it late on in the fight and all they'll be doing is leaving more hostages behind. They're going to have enough trouble evacuating the V-150 crews as it is. Hathren- suicidals?'

'Unlikely but not impossible.' She said. 'More likely to be men willing to gamble on a thin chance of survival, or intending to lie low after the op and escape through the underground railroad.'

'We'll know anyway, if they leave any kind of escape ship with the ion cannon, won't we?' Aron asked.

'Yes. Phase three; escalation.' The holodisplay showed a planet with near orbit criss-crossed by dozens of trails and dots, little sparks of fire. Lennart continued, 'Our purely tactical goal is to inflict damage on the Rebellion, and rack up more of a score for Black Prince.  
'The political goal is to capture information or individuals capable of testifying just how thoroughly embedded the Alliance is in this sector.' Short term goal, anyway, Lennart thought to himself. The long term goal was to keep an old, ugly secret hidden.

'Now, we have parts of the picture,' he looked at Aron, Jhareylia, Franjia, 'and we may be morally certain; but basically, we're trying to indict a Sector Governor for incompetence, and that requires a higher standard of proof than the hunches of war. I would run with what the Fulgor's compcore gave us if I had to, but it would be a long shot. The Fulgor was regional command anyway; what I hope to do is draw in the distant covering party. That could present an interesting challenge. You heard nothing?'

'No, sir.' Aron said.

'Captain Lennart-' Jhareylia began. She was still afraid of Lennart- for his casualness, more than anything else. He should look as if his responsibilities sat on him more heavily; he was frighteningly unaffected.

'As far as I know, we have a lot of movement out-sector, we, well, we sell ships to the rest of the Alliance. Part of what we get back is preferment - a lot of people from Vineland sector have gone on to rise pretty high. There's a lot of support they can call on, but I don't know about the timing.'

'My working assumption is probably one, possibly two destroyers. That should be enough of a fight to raise attention.' Lennart said, then paused, looked up at the ceiling, cocked his head as if he was listening for something.

'Captain, this is Com-Scan.' Ntevi; the duty watch officer. 'The Ghorn II defence platform is reporting hyperspace bow shocks. Several medium, many small.'

'And so it begins.' Lennart said, reaching for the com panel. 'Bridge, sound General Quarters. Aldrem, Jandras, Rahandravell- wait here.' Brenn and Olleyri left; he had to glare at Jhareylia Hathren.

He waited until she had left, then turned to Aldrem. 'I know about the white lie you told her. I passed the information up the chain of command, and HIMS Antorevan was intercepted and boarded by Minotaur at 0200 Coruscant Time.' HIMS Minotaur was a Shockwave-class heavy destroyer, one of their squadronmates in 851. 'Eighty-seven officers and men were brought to trial and found guilty of piracy, robbery, murder, and misuse of Imperial resources.'

'I see, sir. Thank you.' Aldrem saluted, and left. Jhareylia was waiting outside, having no definite combat assignment; he caught her by the shoulders and pulled her to him, hugged the breath out of her before she could ask, let her go, kissed her forehead and sprinted for turret Port-4.

'Aron, Franjia.'

'Yes, sir?' they both said, nervously.

'I thought that you, of all people,' he said looking at Franjia, 'could be counted on to maintain a healthy hate of the Rebellion. Have you forgotten Tellick and Inturii so soon?' stinging her deliberately.

No, sir.' She said, angrily. 'But, as we said to them, it's a civil war. You expect the opposite sides to have nothing in common? Some of them were, really, frighteningly like us.'

'With similar griefs, and sense of loss…what difference do you think that should be allowed to make?' Lennart asked her, inviting her to commit career suicide.

Aron saved her. 'We were sent to do a job we didn't understand, and be sneaky, treacherous, devious, underhand and manipulative about it; Captain, I think you should have been more worried if we came back normal.'

'You don't know the half of it.' Lennart said, shooting from the lip. 'We'll be deploying in thirty minutes. Epsilon squadron will be depending on you to lead them, in the name of the Galactic Empire.'

'We won't let them down, sir.' Aron assured him.


	16. Chapter 16

The executions were scheduled to start at dawn. So it was the nightside of Ghorn II that lit up with nearly two hundred brief new stars.

The Alliance had burnt a lot of capital, sacrificed most of its sleeper cells and intelligence units, and called in a lot of favours to make this happen. The ground side was not exactly being handled by a crack commando team - and probably the better for it.

Punch a hole in the planetary shield generator network, and take out the theatre shield that could fill the gap; rather than send in a bunch of jittery enthusiasts playing Hero of the Republic with equipment patterns - and tactical ideas - going back to the Ruusan Reformation, they sent a small bunch of fixers, fudgers, and improvisers. They had bothered to think about the problem; the garrison wasn't officially on alert, but the men - more sensible than their officers - were so keyed up they might as well have been. So sneaky was out.

The central node of the planetary shield web was in a fenced and guarded enclosure in the middle of a major public park; the clear space around served as killing ground for the guards and safety distance and accident management space for the shield unit.

The easiest way around the problem was to hijack a heavy cargo skiff, and have it flown by a kamikaze droid - which power dived it into the planetary shield generator. Inactive, not under the stress of carrying its own energy, the resilience that required made the shield a hard target; the plummeting hauler damaged it only, beyond immediate usability but not beyond repair - for the time being, that was enough.

The theatre shield was in the outer courtyard of the garrison base, and was dealt with similarly; a light freighter in transit saw the flash, banked drastically to clear the area, across normally protected airspace - and jettisoned a pallet of fuel pods over the generator. Cluster bombing with hypermatter fuel cells was nowhere near as efficient as doing it with proton or thermal bombs, but it surely was effective.

Normally very safe, they had had their seals weakened to make them more likely to rupture. Most of them still failed to detonate, but enough managed to split open for a ripple of pressure waves that tore the generator apart, cracked the courtyard walls, caved in the face of the garrison building.

Above the atmosphere, the rebel formation started to sort itself out into task groups; the Mon Cal ships were late and high, as Lennart had expected - the -40, a –30b light carrier, a –30c torpedo boat; the human-manned vessels in lower orbit.

The fighters started to stream towards their targets; two thirds of the fighters and a third of the bombers headed for the surface to take out the planetary defence forces and start softening up the prison.

The bulk of the bombers and the last third of the fighters made for the Golan. The platform commander had not been happy about Lennart's plan, but being immobile, the only alternative he had was either to bail out almost immediately, which would not look good. That or rat out to the sector group. Squealing did have theoretical advantages - provided the sector group actually bothered to do anything, which was not a given.

The Great Murzim Stem no longer had its heavy jammer, the Golan was screaming for help and the Neutron Star putting out what static it could- it was also rolling to bring it's main turrets to bear.

As intended, the StarGun began to fire on the fighters - its guns were not made for the job of tracking targets that fast and small, so it was firing predicted grid salvos, trying to get them before they got to close quarters. It wasn't an efficient or economical way of doing it, but the crew of the battle station weren't convinced they were going to be around long enough to worry about that. It was working, too; the short-barrel turbolasers were more than enough to melt rebel bombers. They were only designed to contest near-planetary space, really just to prevent bombardment and landings.

The Alliance's best option would have been to stand off beyond the Golan's effective range and hose it with MTL fire, but they needed things to happen faster than that. So send the fighters in, and take the losses and the time they bought.

The turbolaser salvos the Great Murzim Stem and the MC-40 did send scintillating towards the Golan forced them to focus their shields against them, opened up soft spots for the fighters to exploit.

The platform had no actual point defence worth mentioning, because it had been designed with the clone wars and the hordes upon hordes of droid fighters in mind.

It had seemed so near impossible to get rid of them by shooting at them, the designers had settled on an alternative solution entirely - beef up the shields to soak up fighter weapons fire, so ignoring them, and carry an exclusively big gun fit to shoot at the motherships. It had almost made sense.

Their best chance was when the Alliance bombers stopped manoeuvring and settled to line up torpedo shots. As they pointed on, the Golan lashed waves of green at them, blowing five of the first Y-wing squadron apart. The Alliance fighters tried to weave their way through the storm, started to fail, some broke off and ran, then one of them had the bright idea of throwing the book away. An immobile target with limited point defence didn't really need a hard contact, did it?

Eleven pilots too late to work that out, but perhaps not too late for the mission. They began to touch and loose, firing on partial locks, shoot then keep moving, roll round the target, swarm it, hit flanks and underside. Somehow, through overdriven shielding, the deterrent effect of waves of green shot pouring out of the platform, and sheer dumb luck, the Golan survived the first coordinated strike and the streams of torpedoes hammering at its shields.

The Golan's own fighter complement had been held back until the rebel formation had been broken up and they had a fighting chance; now was the time.

On the surface, at Ion Cannon mount North Temperate A, the gun crew were boggled - so many alarms going off, so many separate alerts they missed the one for ground intrusion.  
Most of them had been asleep; they raced to their stations, undressed and half-dressed, the night duty party already had it on-line when the main gun team arrived and brought the V-150 into action.

They got one burst of fire off - three shots, tracking on to and the last splashing over a Corellian Corvette manoeuvring for atmospheric entry. It was the evacuation transport. It flared out spectacularly, lightning arcs crackling down to the upper air and the ship's lights and engines spasming, and started to tumble end for end down to the planet.

The hull might survive re-entry, but one flaw in the seals would let enough hot gas through to roast the crew alive - which if it did happen would only pre-empt the inevitable, slamming into solid ground without working tensors or relative-inertials. At least it was the usual choice; buried or cremated.

One of the ion crew started their victory chant; ' "Ion Cannon don't kill people-" '

' "Uncontrolled re-entry kills people." Set me up on the next.' They were settling down and looking for the next target when the control bunker door blew in, and the team of Alliance volunteer commandos came in shooting.

The surface attack fighter stream had one target - the planetary capital. It was the only logical place of execution, it was where everything was going to happen. They played it the same way, dropping below the horizon and terrain-hopping, the single X-wing squadron in the lead doing final tactical recon and wild weasel.

The truest yardstick of the Alliance's real success was the proportion of people who, when they hit a place, came out onto the rooftops to cheer, as against how many came out to shoot at them. There was a lot of light random ground fire.

Not much of it mattered, they were after the real stuff. The garrison base received a phased squadron volley of proton torpedoes; they hadn't finished clearing the blast marks off the walls from Aron's go at it, never mind the new set.

It ceased to be a problem after it ran out of walls. The phased volley hit the scan towers, crippled the effectiveness of the point defence; hit the defence mounts just to be sure; dipped down the fighter launch and vehicle garage bays, blasted open the heart of the ferrocrete ziggurat.

A handful of scout troopers and stormtroopers made it out, but so much heat was dumped into the structure, it melted and slumped in on itself, liquefying.

The Golan's two squadrons of TIE/ln took losses from stray shots as they left the hangar bays, but not enough to stop them as they broke up into their flight hunting groups and scythed into the loose, scattered rebels.

The rebels had already lost the equivalent of a squadron, mostly bombers, in the approach run; the faster T-wings extended out of the formation, accelerating clear to reform and bounce the TIEs in their turn, the slower R-41s and Z-95s tried to stay with and cover the Y- and local bombers.

The typical cynical Imperial pilot's definition of the usual rebel bag of odds and sods was 'if it's got torpedoes, it's a bomber. If it's got concussions, it's strike or intercept. If it's got blaster gas, somebody down in Supply's on the take again.'

Two squadrons of Y-wings - the survivors of two and a half - made up the bulk of the rebel strike force; not completely hopeless as dogfighters, they were close enough to make it seem that way. They used what advantages they had - their size and toughness, their turrets and torpedoes, weaving to cover each other against the speeding, laser-spitting TIEs. In open space it would have meant that the rebel ships had to slow their rate of fire and take aimed shots at the platform to avoid hitting their own fighters in the furball; against the background of the planet, they were doing that anyway.

The Imperial platform did have to shift fire away from the rebel fighters, but it had more than enough other targets.

The loss of the evacuation transport would damage the rebel plan, but not yet wreck it; they had a handful of proper dropships including a stolen AT-AT landing barge, a larger assortment of superannuated Clone Wars craft from both sides, and the inevitable small gaggle of tramp freighters.

They led the attack, making awkward, brute force re-entries - dodging and twisting in the fire from the Golan, one –9979 lost control and skimmed off. The Golan blew it away as an afterthought; a Republic lander never made it that far.

Through that, they were starting to think the rest was going to be easy when Kondracke's Lancer rose out of its hide like a pantomime monster. He had been in the stadium complex's main arena; came up on repulsors, smashing through the weather dome - for no reason other than sheer drama - and into view of the Rebel fighters.

The antifighter frigate was still not in full functioning condition, but at least this time its guns were fully manned. Quick, accurate Correllian quads, but for all that he and his crew were frustrated and in need of satisfying explosions, they reluctantly agreed with Lennart's insistence on minimising collateral damage.

They rose up and over the stadium rim and hovered just above the speeder park, loosing maniacal cones of fire freely above the horizon, taking aimed shots at the terrain-hugging rebel fighters.

No starship captain wanted to commit to battle in the middle of a city. It was not exactly one of the normal engagement modes; but it was as strange to the rebels as it was to the imperials, and both sides could at least attempt to exploit that.

No two squadrons the same; X's, Gauntlets, T's, Y's, R-41s and Z-95s, the X-wing squadron commander was senior, and ordered the T-wings to move out, be ready to intercept smaller groups of imperial fighters coming from around the planet, the Y's, R's and Z's to stand by, and led his own squadron and the Gauntlets in.

The Gauntlets were weird little beasts; slow, solid, deep serrations in the leading edge, they were a contemporary and rival to the Y-wing. Their main point of uniqueness was their turreted proton torp launchers. The weight penalty of that made them brutally slow - no worse than the TIE bomber really - but it did mean they could evade and attack at the same time, manoeuvre radically to avoid defensive fire and still get their shots in. They were the bulk of what the Lancer could actually see. They held its attention, stunting for all they were worth, and the X-wings played hide and seek along the horizon, popping up over the rooftops to fire grouped shot and torpedoes.

Both sides were having trouble with the environment. The Lancer's sensors drowned in background clutter and false positives; the rebels were horrified by just how much damage dumping so much energy into the air did. The heat, magnetic pulse, and straightforward concussion wave that rolled out of each proton torpedo detonation tore at the city; if there were any windows left after the previous proton bombings, they were gone now. Pretty soon, 'flammable' was going to become a problem too.

The city centre was not deserted; night shifts, partiers, firms and local offices who dealt with other planets and whose business never stopped for something as mundane as local dark - there were more than enough people around. In that environment, 'people' became 'casualties' frighteningly easily.

No civil attack alarm had been sounded; it didn't need to, as the superheated dry air around the Lancer swelled out and rose up, drawing air and windborne debris in from the rest of the city into its own, artificial lightning-lit storm cell. The fortunate and the sensible took cover anyway.

There were no fires yet - nothing other than the trees in the park - but the alliance fighters being battered around like leaves in a typhoon would fire wild and start hitting structures soon, if the Lancer's gun crews didn't get overexcited and do it for them.

In orbit the fight spiralled around the Golan, TIEs and Y's, the bombers frantically trying to claw off the atmosphere and the TIEs using their superior thrust to spiral around them, braking harder and later.

One Imperial fighter got hit at the bottom of its swing down the gravity well, splashed by a blaster bolt in the wing hub; the pilot ejected, and found himself doing the hundred mile freefall - racing two rebel pilots and an astromech to the ground. Well, their dust would, anyway.

The '95s and '41's were almost as easy prey as the Y-wings; nearly fighters and might have beens, but there were so many of them. Outnumbered by a factor of three, depending on how the fight below went - the thermal bloom torturing the weather cycle of the planet was not merely visible from orbit, it was rapidly becoming dominant.

By doctrine, the fighters were now a "mission element" - which most pilots translated as "expendable". On a broad interpretation, they were right. It meant that this part of the plan simply had to get done, to the best of their ability and endurance, for the sake of the overall objective. They were the acceptable price to pay.  
There was no plausible good end to their part of it, and all there was to do was to go out fighting and do as much damage on the way as possible. Fortunately, most of the pilots who resented that chose to take it out on those actually shooting at them.

One wide-spaced trio of TIEs swung in on the tail of a pair of the cruciform local bombers; the single TIE above and behind, playing wingman, twisted out of the way as an R-41 shot at him and missed.

The rebel element leader had been hoping to slide into the clear space and gun down the two lead TIE - he was already moving towards it anyway, not registering the TIE's survival; it backflipped and accelerated away out of the blind spot, rolled round its Z-axis and put two twin laser bolts into the Rebel.

The R-41 shredded itself in a carrot-shaped explosion; the wingman who had missed the first time took a snapshot at one of the lead Imperial fighters - hitting and overpenetrating low on the port wing, blasting out the lower radiator panels - then tried to sideswipe the trailing TIE.

The intact lead TIE took one chance at its bomber target - wrecking an engine mount, mission kill. The rebel strike craft tried to limp back to the carrier, but a shot from the Golan vapourised it on the way. Then it tried to turn to cover the rest of the flight, but the R-41 slid into the trailing TIE before it could lock and fire; the trailer was slow rolling clear, was crushed against the shields of the Starchaser, and exploded, damaging and stunning the Rebel, lining it up for the leader.

He sprayed a rapid chain of laser bolts at it - detonating it, and being hit in turn by the bomber he had been chasing, which pumped a spray of autoblaster fire into the eyeball.

It was turning for clear space to draw breath and plan a next move when the half-winged TIE, the only survivor of the flight, managed to regain control and blasted a stream of laser pulses at it, zeroing in as it receded; the hit split open the weapon power cells and splashed a red-orange fireball in the sky.

And so it went. Imperial fighters, against the odds, managing to give better than they got but ultimately ground down by locally superior enemy numbers.

The orbital battle ended when the Great Murzim Stem dipped down into an atmosphere-grazing orbit, beneath the StarGun platform and thrusting to hold itself in place, trying to get it over with fast by firing full volleys into the belly of the platform.

The Golan-series were huge sprawling things, but they had relatively little to show for it. A lot of heat dispersal, but the two quad mediums on the Neutron Star could pound it hard enough for local overload, bringing down shield segments and ravaging the structure underneath with the LTLs fired a fraction of a second later, and lashing out around it with what point defence turrets it retained.

That should have been the Mon Cal's task, their light cruiser - realistically, frigate - was better built for the job, but the –40 was still leisurely descending the gravity well.

It was fortunate for the cause of the Alliance that Captains Ibtilamte and Vallander were not face to face, and could do no worse than swear at each other.

The Golan shot back, a clear target at close range, but its guns were only at the heavier end of light turbolaser, and it was taking in more punishment than it was giving out.

Brute force made the end inevitable; the shields billowed and flared out, parts of the structure melted and slumped in on itself, and the slablike station started to spew escape pods.

Only four TIEs broke out of the melee, and moved to re-enter and link up with a local defence unit; between them and the station they had killed better than three squadrons of Rebel fighters, and they had bought time.

The lancer Dubhei Targe was still hovering in front of the gates of the jail, preventing any close approach, with the rebels becoming increasingly reluctant to put the city to the torch by firing any more warheads at her.

It would do no short term good to cook the men they were trying to rescue - was doing no good to riddle with blast-driven fragments the citizens they claimed to want to set free from the Empire. But in that case, what to do? Sit and get shot? For one Gauntlet crew, frustration got the better of reluctance, and they curved up from behind the office tower they were using as shelter and fired three hastily-locked torpedoes.

Two were accurately aimed, one too low. The turrets spat laser shot at the Gauntlet - two connecting, draining its shields and shooting half the forward fins away - and at the two torpedoes showing no aspect change; the Lancer hit one, was hit by and rode out the blast from the second, but ignored the third which hit the car park underneath her, and penetrated thirty metres before detonating - an accidental camouflet.

The blast was bigger than that, but it left a crater in the ground - big enough for the Lancer to drop into. The Dubhei Targe's navigator had carelessly mis-set the repulsors; programmed hover a fixed distance from the planetary surface, not the centre of mass. The surface wasn't there any more, and the Lancer's own engines hauled it downwards - through the superhot vapour and the ejecta - and embedded it in the crater, tilted half-in, half out, with too many heat dispersers and guns masked or driven into foundation pilings.

Kondracke screamed at his navigator. The shields battered at the earth and rock they were embedded in and drained themselves out, and the Alliance saw their chance.

The dropship pilot had dreamed of opportunities like this; pre-celebrated in cartoons all over the galaxy.

There was a certain glorious inevitability about it. He warned the troops in back to get on to the upper gantries and strap in, cut the braking thrusters, and accelerated downwards, at the Lancer. With an AT-AT barge.

Kondracke looked at the large and growing blip on the abstract tactical display; he had just time to make the mental transition from the commander of a ship, thinking about vectors, arcs of fire, radiator temperatures, to a man on the bridge of a ship thinking, dreck - I'm going to get squished here.

He had been a leading member of the dramatic society at his naval academy; he ran for the accessway, realised he wasn't going to make it, and his last thought as the collision alarm sounded was that it wasn't enough they were going to kill him - someone else was going to get star billing for it.

The drop barge fell on the Lancer's bridge module like a hundred kiloton hammer. The compensators on the barge took it in fairly good condition - it was only 3000 'g' of acceleration, imposing severe but not excess strain.

The Lancer's systems were still in failure-analysis mode over the grounding, the electronic equivalent of 'oops', and the crew had been too badly stunned to over-ride them. It took the impact badly. The ramming, in effect, crushed the bridge tower to twisted fragments and drove the jumble down into the hull.

The loss of the bridge took out the active control point. Imperial security provisions, legalities, verifications - with the captain dead, the next authorised in line of command had to certify that, and that he was taking over. It was supposed to help prevent unauthorised access and mutiny, but it imposed a sometimes critical delay in regaining control of a crippled ship.

There were at least three other places that had the information systems to exercise command from: Com-Scan, main engineering and gunnery control, if anyone had the wit to; it was not impossible that the Dubhei Targe might be able to survive.

What was likely to make it impossible was the battalion of Alliance assault troops deploying quite literally on top of them, with lots of convenient hull breaches to work with.

The rest of the drop ships touched down around the crater, now that it was safe to do so, and sent their men out into the searing heat.

That was actually being dealt with; the regional weather control system was starting to conduct damage control, nudge the bloom of hot air inland, away from the city, to - relatively - barren areas where the cyclone could be left to blow itself out.

Some of the rebel pilots, from primitive worlds without such things, thought the air-heating and cooling lasers were attacking them and moved to strafe; they hit a couple before they were reined in, the propaganda damage was greater than the physical. The weather control crews - who would later be portrayed as heroically standing by their duty in the face of psychopathic terrorist attack; it was closer to the truth than usual - managed to prevent the full scale firestorm that was building, and started shuffling in masses of cool, wet air.

The closing stages of the fight had tipped a lot of places over combustion point, and there were several streets' worth of normal sized fires to be put out.

The stadium had caught light, of course, the structure damage less important than that the seating was burning. Not actually comparable in lethality to a chemical weapon attack, at least not in the short term, the toxic fumes pouring out of the duraplast choked and confused both sides.

Some of the Rebel troops had respirators. The prisoners certainly wouldn't.

Inside the giant two hundred thousand seater stadium, the central space was variable, could be swapped out easily from one purpose to another. There were many levels of basement holding the environment trays and the stadium furniture, and presumably - tacscans had failed to find them anywhere else - the rebel prisoners.

The dropship had luck it did not deserve when it hit the Lancer dead on; without the Imperial frigate to catch its fall, the groundquake would have collapsed most of them and killed everyone they came to save - as well as doing the city no good at all.

The troops guarding the rebels were mainly CompForce, the military arm of the Imperial Security Bureau. They had been given the task precisely because their head office had been torpedoed by 'Rebel murdering bastard druggie fringer scum', alias Squadron Leader Aron Jandras of the Imperial Starfighter Corps, and they had already beaten twenty of the prisoners to death to relieve their feelings, even before the shooting started.

There were two companies of them, and between the vessels of the attack group the Alliance could scrape up the equivalent of a regiment. In their favour, they had hostages and a closed structure with clear, well defined ways in.

Until one of the circling light freighters decided that the most obvious way in was probably the worst, and set out to blow a hole in the stadium floor. Firing blind through the reddish-brown choking smoke, it set up a series of proximity flak bursts that fused shallow craters in the module surface and cracks around them.

Some of the first rebel troops in got hit by the flash, the rest took cover until it was over, then used hand weapons to blast the rest of the way through the metre thick ferrocrete slab; some covering the holes and some dropping through, they broke into the basement levels and started hunting the security force.

At this, the rebels did have a decisive advantage. More of them had seen action than the CompForcers, and the ISB troops' doctrine was aggressive to the point of stupidity.

The more politically correct of the company commanders won the what-to-do argument, with the most politically correct course of action - counterattack and drive the rebels out.

By that point the Alliance lead elements had gone looking for the blocking parties covering the entrances they were expected to use, and blindsided them.

In the shelter of one of the burning buildings, the handful of Stormtroopers that made it out of the garrison base were monitoring, necessarily expressionless - but disgusted at the stupidity of the ISB. There were only a shade over two platoons; against a regiment, they were certainly going to die. That was unfortunate, but it wasn't the problem. What was worrying them was how to do enough damage to the enemy to make it worthwhile.

They were watching and waiting, looking for somewhere in the rebel plan to stick a large, white spanner. If they had known the ion mount was in rebel hands, they would have gone for that instead, but all they could deal with was what was in front of them. Then they saw it.

Outrageous luck had served the Alliance well to this point, there was no reason it shouldn't prove to be a two-edged sword; Dubhei Targe's bow was sticking up out of the crater.

The troopers opened fire with a rapid volley at the rebels still dismounting from their dropships and the control tower of the drop barge at the other end of the crater, dropping many and forcing the rest to cover.

As a matter of procedure, the heavy-rifle snipers and the repeatermen had aimed for the antipersonnel weapons on the dropships, degrading their ability to cover the rebel squaddies.

The senior survivor, the staff sargeant with most time in grade, made a decision; at this point it should be fire and manoeuvre, bounding forward section by section, but soon the rebels would realise how few of them there were and get their act together. Then they would be pinned down and prevented from moving at all.

So exploit the initial shock and run for it now, firing from the hip - wild but with some suppressive use - as they went. It wasn't as if they were going to last long enough to need to conserve ammo, after all.

All the stormtroopers, then, broke cover, scrambling forwards, spraying blaster bolts wherever they had a clear line of fire past their own comrades, hitting more rebels with splinters than shot.

One of the YTs opened up on them with its belly turret, spraying low power laser shot, secondary blast vapourised 'crete knocking troopers down, picking up others and throwing them - only two direct hits, but the disruption of the blast gave some of the rebel infantry time to organise themselves and shoot back. The small formation lost a quarter of its strength killed, stunned, or pinned down and unable to take part in the battle for the Lancer.

On the lip of the crater, the stormtroopers established a firing line, some keeping the rebels they had just cut through suppressed, most of them shooting at the rebs in and on the Lancer. They picked one hull breach, fired a platoon volley at it, triple tapping in two shot burst mode - then one squad charged down over the broken surface of the crater to take and exploit, and the rest switched target to the next hole.

It was procedure, shooting each other in to the target in sequence, but the senior sergeant looked up and spotted the YT coming round for another pass, with a flight of fighters in support.

If they were stupid enough to use torps again, the blast would fry enough rebels that it would be justified to sit here and let them shoot; but they wouldn't be that dumb twice in quick succession. He ordered his men to move now, all forward fast, get in among the rebs and do some damage.

It was actually too late; most of the Dubhei Targe's crew had already been taken prisoner or killed, or frightened into panicked incoherence. It would have been practically impossible to sort through who was left and regain control.

They tried anyway, advancing behind a carpet of blaster fire and bulkhead splinters, trying to punch through to the still Imperial controlled areas of the ship and take out as much as possible of the rebel command structure on the way.

Against the rest of the rebel mixed bag it might have worked, but there were two formed battalions, based off the frigates, and this crew were the Great Murzim Stem's assault strength.

They had been trained together, under the control of someone who was more or less competent, and their doctrine said, in this sort of mutual close quarters fighting, to lay maximum fire down on the contact - including grenades, it wasn't their ship after all - and fall back, regrouping as they went until they reached local superiority then surround and outnumber the attackers.

The stormtroopers surpassed the rebels in tactical dexterity - used that to push them locally on to the back foot, shoot some of them then find another line of advance, avoid being sucked into rebel fire pockets - but there was only so much ship to play with, and too many Alliance infantry.

The platoon sergeant died countercharging a rebel ambush party; one of them had a thermal detonator. The stormtrooper cannoned into him, broke his jaw and knocked him down, shot two of his mates, then felt something ding off his helmet.

Two feet was not the recommended range for demolition/breacher grenade use. It was almost funny. Then, boom.

There wasn't really anyone else to stop the rebels; city of about five million people, basically peaceful and loyal, a regiment of stormtroopers, a regiment of CompForce - also dead, now - and about twenty thousand civil police.

The cops were not armed or trained for full scale war; they were forming a cordon, hoping to keep the rebels in and stop any have-a-go heroes from getting themselves killed, and protect the fire and paramedic teams. They were actually in relatively little danger - no more than the usual demands of the job - because the infantry were busy and after the weather control laser debacle, the Rebel fighter commander was keeping his squadrons on a very short leash. Some of them were forming their own cordon around the city, prevent any garrisons from the rest of the planet moving to intervene; only the X-wings were given a strike target, the governor's palace, and he was three miles underground by the time they melted it.

CompForce had died like the fools they were, but they had shot another thirty of the prisoners to prevent them being recaptured first, and another hundred had died and many were suffering from fume inhalation.

Instructions from the strike commander: get them out and into the dropships as fast as possible, leave a small fighter element to protect them. The dropships were to shelter under the atmosphere until called for, but the rest of the fighters were wanted in space now. Something about an incoming Imperial heavy frigate, Acclamator or Meridian class.


	17. Chapter 17

The rebels reoriented themselves to meet the threat; the less capable combat vessels, the light carrier MC-30b and 'saddleback' Corellian Corvette conversion, remained to cover and retrieve the dropships, the MC-40 turned to meet it in high orbit accompanied by the torpedo MC-30c and the gun-armed corvette, Great Murzim Stem and the two Nebulons following as a second division out on the flank, for crossfire.

The Meridian class- Kuat called them Acclamator-II - were shorter and more compact than their ancestors. The original Ecliptics had been designed first to replace, then after the Republic Senate refused to cough up the cash revised to serve as flagships for squadrons of, the old Dreadnaught-class. They had a typical flagship's generous bay space for emergencies and contingencies, and intervention assets - troops and fighters.

When one had been required, it had actually been an obvious and logical move to base the design of the fleet's new standard planetary assault ship on a heavy, efficient, and by now proven reliable hull. Hyperdrive and cooling systems had been moved aft - on a few nightmare examples rebuilt half way through construction it had been a problem, purpose built hulls from then on - and the interior rearranged. True, it had left the Acclamator vastly over-rated for the mere transport side of her duties, but most people thought that had been a budget dodge anyway.

In the Imperial Starfleet, they now served as assault spearheads; sent to break through the final line of planetary defences and take an area by seizing it or simply blasting it clean, big enough to bring the non-combatant division and corps-level transports safely down on.

The Meridians brought main engineering back inside the armoured primary hull, converted most of the bay space that was left into fuel tank, kept six of the Acclamator's quad mediums and replaced the other six with single heavy turbolasers.

To fill a tactical gap - or, cynics said, to justify Kuat's selling them to the Imperial Starfleet - they were designed to complement the high-power, medium-short endurance destroyers, by going for the long-haul deep patrol role. Slower, but with twenty-five years' worth of hotel load.

While fleet destroyers specialised in hunter and deterrence operations - that is, deterring imperials from joining the rebels as much as deterring the rebels from attacking - the Ecliptics and Meridians got the slow jobs. Distant escort for merchant convoys, protecting army and military stores transports, occasionally something actually interesting like enforcement group command and recon in force.

As far as Commander Barth-Elstrand on the Comarre Meridian was concerned, this was almost too good to be true. Large numbers of soft targets at close range, no going and looking for them required. No hide-and-seek, nothing but hijacked planetary defences to worry about.

The heavy frigate was zig-zagging, to avoid defensive fire. Also to try to get the rebels against the backdrop of open space. It was only one little planet, true. It probably was basically expendable, and it probably wouldn't land him any worse than a reprimand if he put a dent in it - especially considering any damage would likely be blamed on the Rebels anyway.

Also, he was supposed to be that ruthless, if duty called for it.

How many people ever do put, 'Today I shall become a mass murderer', on their to-do lists? Elstrand hadn't. He had been watching the fight unfold from long distance sensors - what news footage there had been was too incoherent to show much of the tactics - and the collateral damage had been impressive. Most of it accidental, true - lob that many torpedoes at buildings directly and the city would be a cratered, blazing ruin.

That was enough to be getting on with. Execution, maybe, but not random butchery. He would try and avoid using Ghorn II as a backstop.

As far as it using him as a target was concerned, thank fortune - or the Force, although you weren't supposed to do that any more - for budget cuts.

There were supposed to be eight ion cannon sites, both poles, three one hundred and twenty degrees apart round the north temperate zone, three equally spaced in an offset ring in the south temperate zone, something like the corners of a cube, and six superheavy turbolaser mounts, at the centre of the faces of the cube. The economists had butchered that plan - said the planet's status as a target didn't justify it, not with a naval base in the same system capable of sending defending forces. They only had the two ion cannon, the other was still in Imperial hands, and on the other side of the planet.

Time to see if their plan made sense. Or for that matter if the rebels' did. Eight squadrons' worth of Alliance fighters - they had started with around a hundred and sixty, their shuttles were doing search and rescue, they had maybe a hundred and ten left and ninety of them were heading his way. The rebel plan seemed to be to intercept him and fight a distant engagement, fighter strike with the ships in support. The MC-40 behaved as if it believed it, anyway.

He could almost hit it from here…it had shields and weapons ready, but it was flying a slow, straight course, manoeuvring short. Gutless frogspawn, Elstrand thought, watching its vector shift.

Perhaps it was inevitable. As the Imperial Starfleet managed to catch and kill the defector and leftover-Republic assets of the bolder elements of the Alliance, most of what they had left would be the more cautious, later arriving alien elements, the balance of power within the Rebel Alliance would shift, and it would start to look like the Confederation, mark II. Most of their heavy metal was nonhuman, chiefly Mon Cal, in origin even now, wasn't it? That would leave the Alliance increasingly politically screwed, push them from being an armed mass movement, which at least gave the Starfleet something interesting to shoot at, into underground criminals and terrorists.

The idea of an interstellar underground was slightly dissonant, but a few headaches would be the least of the price of victory.

For the moment, of his ship's own three squadrons, the Bombers were carrying concussion and flying close escort, a trick he had heard of from the Briefcase Brigade - the parade of contractors, consultants and think-tank teams that plagued a beached warship. Supposedly, an Imperial admiral - a nonhuman, one of the very few - named Thrawn had trialled the idea of using missile armed bombers as close escort interceptors. Elstrand had his four stormtrooper transports out and doing the same. Neither of them could accelerate fast enough to get past the rebel fighter swarm, so they would play close escort, while the TIE/ln, which did have the thrust, would go and attempt to accomplish their strike mission, without warheads. Sometimes you just got the feeling it wasn't supposed to make sense.

For the moment, the Comarre was fencing with them, trying to lure them away and open up clean lines of fire.

Commander Elstrand had been studying fleet tactics for years, and had increasingly despaired of any chance to put any of it into practise; his chief thought on watching the rebels manoeuvre to counter him was kriff, it actually works. He had been impressed by Black Prince's use of flak burst fire, and had tried to get his gun crews to do the same; only one of the HTL and one MTL crew had been able to do it consistently in simulation, so they got to try it for real now. The process involved half-choking the bolt in the barrel, sending the lead part out fractionally slower than the main body, so the turbolaser bolt overtook, tangled with and burst on itself. Ideally at a predictable distance downrange.

Not every captain thought it was worth the wear and tear on the gun barrels, and in most cases with a turbolaser heavy enough to produce a decent splash, the cost of the hypermatter fuel to power the shot was probably greater than the cost of the fighters you could reasonably expect to bring down. That was all right. His real target was their battle plan.

There were so many rebel fighters, they had got in each other's way down on the planet, but now they had a proper swarm-sized target they intended to make the most of it.

If you went by command equivalence- assuming the ship a Commander's seniority justified, a medium or heavy frigate, was equivalent to the fighter unit led by an officer of the same grade - he was outgunned.

The light turbolasers opened up on the fighter group with a clear line behind them, the rebels broke into a loose pack formation and started jinking, twitching out of the way whenever they had a lock on them. Some of the gunners tried passive targeting, but the rebel jamming produced too many false reads, and they hadn't had time to develop the subtlety under pressure or the sixth sense to tell the real from the artefactual.

Flak bursts didn't care. The four medium and the heavy detonated in the rebel fighter stream; they scattered as they recognised the unstably-rippling green tracer, but not far enough. The local force craft had the thinnest shielding and were hit the worst, especially by secondary detonations.

It wasn't an inherent problem with the torpedo design; in fact, the torps the rebels were using, often stolen and reconditioned surplus, were usually beyond shelf life and more likely to fail to detonate when they were supposed to than the other way around. Most of the pilots chose to set their torpedoes to detonate if they were intercepted, run with unusually large flank and rear distance settings on the proximity fuses. They preferred a low-order boom to no boom at all, volatility by choice. Sometimes that turned a near miss or a point defence interception into an effective hit, and sometimes they paid for it.

The TIE Bombers followed the chaos up, shooting missiles at the damaged and tumbling rebels, launch then turn away, better a chancy shot and live to take another than press in and get killed. It worked at first, the flak bursts killed five local bombers and four Y-wings and set up another two local and three Y for the TIEs, but the rebel interceptors broke formation to chase them down.

There were still better than twenty T-wings flying; the Bombers shot more missiles at them and broke up into pairs, started to weave in preparation for the fight.

The Imperial frigate blasted light turbolaser volleys at the T-wings as they lanced in, only hitting two - crisping them instantly - but the evasions of the rest gave the bombers a better chance as they entered close quarters.

The four transports were still in the missile phase, firing past the dogfight at the concussion-armed rebel fighter-bombers, who returned the favour. The transports were bigger, easier targets, but they had better sensor gear to lock and guide missiles in with, so hit scores would be high on both sides.

Concussions were multimode; capable of accepting assistance from firing or friendly vessels if it was available, doing without if it wasn't. They could be fired and forgotten, were more likely to score if they were guided in.

The Imperial transports were doing that and preparing to rely on defensive fire; the rebels were jinking.

The first splash killed two R-41, maimed a third; hits drew down the shields of all the transports but only cracked one, bursting on the side of the absurdly minvan-looking stormtrooper transport and opening the empty troop compartment to space.

The X-wings, Gauntlets and surviving Y-wings began to loose torpedoes at Comarre; in a fleet melee one could get away with fire and forget, but in single ship operations they had to be steered - ridden in, most pilots said - to stand any real chance of not being decoyed into missing or stymied into becoming sitters for the point defence.

That was especially frustrating for the X-wings, stuck in the bomber role simply because they could and did carry proton torps, and their electronics were two generations more advanced - not technically, but tactically - than the Y's. They could also sidestep LTL fire more effectively. Three Y-wings failed to do so; one broke up - the pilot amazingly not dead - the other two fireballed.

The Gauntlets could do more than just sidestep; instead of locking on and flying more or less steady with the turret traversing freely to protect themselves, they could lock the turret on and manoeuvre the main hull freely. They broke out of the rebel attack stream and some of them went hunting, one killed a TIE Bomber and one finished off the damaged transport.

They would take some killing. Mass sequential, fire everything at one after another, might do. In the meantime, there were easier targets to hit to draw down the rebel fighter strength and the number of torpedoes they could fire at him.

The first volley was on terminal, red-lining their thrusters to sprint through the point defence envelope. Almost seventy incoming. Comarre moved into her own terminal-approach routine, jamming and evading as radically as she could, as unpredictable as a ship which answered the helm so slowly could reasonably be.

Fifty hits. Fifty tiny, brilliant fireballs sparkled off the Meridian's shields, enough to kill a small or bring down the shields of a medium warship, against a large ship - by Alliance standards, anyway - it was degradation, more heat to be bled off. Another three or four like that would break down the shielding entirely.

The planetary ion cannon took a shot at the Meridian; electronic warning well in advance, and the slow-moving, relatively quickly dispersing ion bolts achieved nothing by the time they reached the Imperial frigate, probably more of a danger to their own ships in orbit. Not an immediate danger, but if he closed in after the Rebel warships, and the ion cannon got him -  
the fighters could pick my ship to pieces, Elstrand thought.

He felt like flipping a coin, knew if he did it would only be a shabby attempt to find someone else to blame. And it wouldn't work. He was supposed to know. Captain's prerogative.

Deploy the /ln now, defensively? Doctrine stated - maintenance of the aim.

What was the aim? The goal, the hope? To…this was technically an illegal operation anyway, wasn't it? Doctrine be damned.

'Change of plan. Release the TIEs into the melee. Inform their task is now close defence anti-fighter.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' the increasingly nervous flight controller replied.

Rebel training was showing its usual uneven quality. A handful of veterans and naturals, who were capable of doing serious damage, a slightly larger total who had at least been well trained, and all too many amateur enthusiasts. Five TIE bombers and two Transports were down, for two T-wings and eight R-41.

The Starchaser was supposed to be tougher than the TIE Bomber, and combat shielded, but the difference in innate agility was less than the difference in the pilots' training, and the Bombers' heavy lasers, designed to strafe capital craft, punched through fighter shields and armour easily.

Numbers, though, numbers; if he committed now, as he had, what was he supposed to do about the planetary ion cannon? Bombard that bridge when he came to it.

The Gauntlets were continuing to fight backwards, turrets locked on and spaceframes moving freely, and they were chasing down the remaining transports.

The T-wings were trying to hunt down the Bombers, and the R-41s trying to escape from the melee to join the Y-wings and add concussion to proton fire. As good a moment as any for a scramble.

The TIEs screamed out of the flight bays - at least one of the rebel pilots had been counting, and expecting it. The T- and X-wings swung in to intercept them, in organised manoeuvre this time, and Elstrand picked his moment.

As the rebel bombers swung away to give the fighters striking room the Comarre's engines fired, ramped up rapidly to maximum thrust.

There had been an original mistake, that turned into a happy accident: the original heavy frigates had been supposed to be much heavier than they had turned out to be. When the design was revised, they had kept the engines, and the results were two very and one outrageously fast classes of ship. Meridians couldn't outrun torpedoes, but they could outpace most of the craft that carried them.

The X- and T-wings could keep up, but it left them with virtually no thrust in hand; the X- especially, with their more dangerous torpedoes, only had about 200 'g' on a Meridian. They had to manoeuvre very predictably to chase Comarre, and that left them fairly easy meat for the 900 'g' faster TIE/ln.

That changed things. The rebels, looking for a silver lining, were about to celebrate driving Comarre from the frying pan into the fire, when the ion cannon mount reported that it was under attack.

The Imperial garrison fighters, under remote direction, had formed into an attack stream spearheaded by the Golan's survivors, a mix of TIEs and Z-95's. The TIE/ln could strafe the armoured shell of the V-150 until the ground around it started to boil without doing it any serious harm. They lanced in first, going for point defence turrets, sensor arrays, outlying units - three getaway skiffs were found and destroyed, four point defence turrets it cost two TIEs to eliminate, then the missile armed Z-95s swept in.

They were obsolescent, inferior in every respect except this; with defences suppressed, rebel fighters near the planet still guarding the dropships and evac transports, they could afford to make a proper job of it. They fired from close range, launching at the visible tip of the ion gun, at the line where the ball of the turret sat in the socket of the mounting; unguided, with a large, stationary target - the missiles crashed into the huge globe, jamming it in place and smashing the final aiming tunnel.

The Great Murzim Stem and the Rebel frigate appeared to be trying to change places, the Mon Cal frigate trying to get out of the way of the charging Imperial and the fragile, already shield-depleted and scarred armed merchant manoeuvring to intercept.

In terms of hardware, the neat, compact little aquaslab was the more dangerous, but her captain was, at best, a reluctant warrior. Probably capable enough if backed into a corner - which he had to have done to him to make him scream for help.

The Rebels were doing their best to fight their way out. The torpedo frigate, MC-30c, launched two full salvos at long range. Someone over there might be paying too much attention to the manual.

The ship torpedoes were much more dangerous than their relatively tiny fighter equivalents, still being sporadically fired from the frigate's aft; Comarre shifted all the guns that could bear forward, launched LTL and low-power MTL streams of shot at the torpedoes, and her main guns crashed out their first coherent salvo at the MC-30.

A cigar of a ship, her captain chose to take a chance and attempt to remain in the fight, turning bows on to minimise his target area. It almost worked. One of the HTL bolts hit her as she straightened out on the new heading, a glancing blow, but enough to dump heat into the shields.

The MC-30 looked something like a baby Recusant that hadn't been properly fed, but had nowhere near the shielding, not even in proportion - the single heavy shot was enough to burn more than half the shielding off and bleed enough heat through to leave a huge molten weal in the casing.

Both the rebel frigates began to return fire, the Great Murzim Stem a slower, more deliberate fire than the MC-40, both of them at least competently trained. Target selection - on the back foot here, Elstrand realised. Firing defensively, failing to dominate the battle.

Doctrine? Take out the most valuable target first, the one which reduces the enemy fleet's effectiveness by the greatest amount in the shortest time. Kill the force multipliers, the carriers and fighter control ships, the command and EW units, in preference, so - the torpedo frigate first.

The torpedoes themselves were unusually intelligent; it was straightforward economics - protect the investment already made in the warhead; easily wise enough to realise that they had been targeted and evade, they were not dying fast enough.

Elstrand pulled the MTL's off them, ordered the guns up to full power and lashed out a coherent salvo at the torpedo corvette.

It bet on its target profile; any manoeuvre would have exposed its flank as a target. Bet and lost. Two MTL bolts hit it on the bow, cost it its perfect profile as they kicked it aside. One HTL bolt splashed into the exposed flank. Thin, depleted shields not enough, the shot burned the little ship almost in half, and the manoeuvring stresses took it the rest of the way. It ripped itself apart.

The engine mount separated - both parts drifting under the influence of the impact, but no starship was completely neutralised until it wasn't generating power. If any auxilliary generators survived in the forward hull, they might still be able to power a torpedo launch.

Elstrand ordered two MTL turrets to stay on it until it was gone, and the rest to switch target.

The Neutron Star would be an easier kill, but it would also be less likely to scream for help. The Mon Cal frigate was more potentially useful for that.

The four quad and six heavy turrets began a slow measured fire, staying on it as the light turbolasers, light ion cannon and actual point defence weapons duelled the incoming torpedoes. They were fractionally easier targets now.

The first salvo had four shot, three jammed, five impacted. They splashed blast waves over the Comarre, briefly engulfing her; she sailed out of the fireball with more than half her shielding pounded down. If the second salvo did as well, the rebels might be in with a chance.

The single HTL that could manage it launched a flak burst at the incoming swarm; they got their timing wrong, it missed - exploded behind them and scored the barrel badly enough that the safety systems shut the gun down.

Not all bad - it did make a clear background, the smear of tracer compound scattered with the burst lasting longer than a nuclear flashbulb, good to shoot missiles against.

Six intercepted, four ballistic, two hit - one local burnthrough right on the bow that left a triangular section of hull glowing white hot. Nothing important underneath, spares and life support tankage space.

The MC-40 would be grateful to get off that lightly. The rebel gunners were better; in a close range, high aspect change engagement, they would score more often - maybe enough to be decisive. They had to live long enough to get that close.

Neither ship was manoeuvring radically now, and the Imperial was pumping out enough electronic noise to eliminate the fine edge, make brute force the order of the day.

Both ships were built to deal with MTL fire, absorb the heat from it and wave it away, but the Imperial ship's heavies scored twice in the first three salvos. That mattered.

The Mon Cal traditional heavy shielding and their focusing of it was all that held it together, the shielding flared out as the rebel frigate was kicked by the heavy shot and almost tumbled end for end.

Captain Vallander of the Great Murzim Stem was a loyal and dedicated warrior of the Alliance - enough so to contemplate the insane. His ship was not under fire, and was using that freedom to make good shooting practise, but the converted merchant simply didn't have the throw-weight to kill an Imperial heavy frigate.

Keep it off long enough to run away, she had done that; or batter a light frigate like an Interdictor until it broke and ran, she had done that too. Not the other way around.

He took a cold look at the situation. Imperial heavy frigate, moving too fast to stop. Rebel medium and light frigate defending a fixed, defenceless objective. The light frigate had the Imperial within its manoeuvre cone - and two hundred heavy concussion missiles in its ordnance bay.

It was depressingly obvious. The Great Murzim Stem turned to cross the path of the still-accelerating Comarre.

Elstrand was starting to wonder, was the trap going to work, or was this it? The MC-30 had been disposed of, the light fire from the two Nebulons and the Corellian was somewhere between an irrelevance and an augmentation to his own point defence, it was only the two rebel frigates in it.

He began to lay LTL fire on the evacuation ships, not aiming for kills, just to stop them flying straight enough to plot a hyperspace route and make sure they needed to fight their way out.

The rebel MC-40 was behaving as he would have hoped, maximum evasion now, stunting, trying to avoid being hit and compromising it's own fire accuracy in the process, and Com-Scan reported a high-power broadcast burst that sounded very much like 'help'. Good - but they also brought his attention to some very strange behaviour on the part of the armed merchant.

'What the stang is he doing? Does he think he has a better chance at point blank?'

Speed, distance, the sheer size of space - Vallander was counting, absolutely, on the willingness of Elstrand to lay him close aboard and finish him.

Comarre had enough thrust in hand to avoid it if she wanted, but Elstrand didn't know about the strikeship business, or the missiles still in the Great Murzim Stem's holds.

The two quads that had been dismembering the-30c were finished, they switched targets to the armed merchant. Streams of green began pounding into her thin forward shielding; the forward turret got hit early on.

'Right, people, listen up, this is Captain Vallander. We have nothing that can kill that Imp frigate, we're not scoring and the Mon Cal aren't either. So I'm going to ram the nerfson. Switch all systems to autocontrol and get to the escape pods.'

The ship kicked again, hit hard; some of them weren't going to take much persuading, some weren't going to live that long.

'When our magazine goes up, it is going to be a kriffing big bang. I'll kick you out at the last safe moment so they don't work it out too soon. May the Force be with you.'

The Imperial frigate had enough of a head start on the fighter swarm that she should start to shed velocity now, decelerate to make a slower pass by the dropships. Elstrand was practically bouncing off the ceiling. This was his first real chance, first opportunity for main line fire combat and it was working, he was winning, it was good. He - and many of his crew - were not in full brain mode. He did not recognise and categorise the threat until it was pointed out to him.

'By the fire rings of fornax!' the com-scan officer said. He was the son of outer rim disaster relief volunteers, as primly and properly brought up as it was possible for a man to be; his increasingly elaborate exclamations were a running wardroom joke. 'I think he's going to ram!'

'What's she supposed to gain by that except suicide?' Elstrand said, scornfully.

At that point - if not a long way sooner - Lennart would have realised something was wrong, and had it closely scanned, had the fighter wing shoot up its engines to buy more time, concentrated fire on it, or banked drastically out of the way, likely all four. Elstrand might mature into a competent commander, but he wasn't there yet.

The forward part of the armed merchant was being hammered into a molten jumble, but collapsing in on itself as it was it served as ablative shielding for the engines and magazine. One of the secondary generators ruptured in a brief flare of light.

Then a shower of escape pods burst loose from the Rebel frigate, and Elstrand finally understood the significance of the suicidal approach.

'Gunnery, cancel fire plan, cancel all tactical instructions, switch all guns to bridge target central direction, kill it-' Elstrand ordered, elation changing to panic.

All the functioning turbolasers paused, twisted to bear, cracked out a volley at the Great Murzim Stem; it was enough to burn through the wreckage, but it was very late, very close - they were less than ten kilometres apart when the two hundred concussion warheads blew.

Imperial Intelligence had a fascinating little gadget called a Hyperspace Orbiting Scanner. In theory, it could read off the contents of a computer - detect the movement of the electrons, the bions, the non-ons, the quantum vortices and the hairs off the back of Schrodinger's Cat.

From a tachyonic perspective. In practise, it was nowhere near that sensitive.

The Com-Scan team of Black Prince knew this because they had stolen one, and had fun playing with it. It was listed as damaged beyond repair while being recaptured from a Rebel attempt to obtain one for study. The Ubiqtorate probably knew the truth, but Lennart had done enough for them over the years, handing over prisoners taken and following up leads, they were not pursuing it actively.

The scan team's working theory was that it was a double bluff; its literally miraculous capabilities had been invented as an excuse and cover story for many, many slicers, penetration agents, interception stations, and similar lower-tech but far more widespread and practical forms of sigint. It could detect big, spectacular events easily enough, though, and it was. The command team of the Star Destroyer were watching the battle unfold via it, and commenting.

'Kriff. He nearly had them in the bag, and to then go and do something that dumb-' Rythanor said.

'Arguably, we were partly to blame for not informing them that it was a possibility.' Brenn pointed out.

'They had the information to put it together. They knew about the previous actions.' Lennart decided. 'They failed to think it through. We may have to move earlier than I expected, simply to rescue what's left of Comarre Meridian. Nav- drop points?'

As far as Lennart was concerned, there was one thing severely wrong with the design of an Imperator's bridge: the basic design concept. They were a ported-in relic of the Clone Wars, designed on the working assumption of highly specialised clone crews, literally bred for the job, and amateur gentleman-volunteer officers. Too much of the routine information flow of the ship was routed away from command level, on the probably accurate assumption they wouldn't know what to do with it, and only command decisions left to them - which, inevitably, they often were not well enough informed to make.

No physical fix was possible - the bridge was the one place every VIP visitor was sure to come, which meant they had to keep it at least apparently fairly close to spec; but the place had more holoprojectors than any three studios. The ship also had more than enough people in Navigation to maintain a continually-updated selection of pre-calculated hyperdrive courses, which Lennart used to give himself tactical options.

He looked at the map of the system, at the symbol and status sheet of the crippled and half-molten Comarre, weighed the factors in his head. One was missing. 'Scan- ah, Cormall.' It was indeed him in charge of the gadget. 'With that thing's sensitivity, I would think you would be able to find better music to listen to...'

The team laughed, partly because it was a captain's joke, partly because he did use it to surf faint signals for good hard rock music anyway. 'What, precisely, would those be?'

The chief looked guilty; caught with a strange blip on his hands. He had been about to report them, had been trying to classify them, had the signal, or signals, isolated and was processing. Lennart recognised that, decided not to fall on him too hard.

'Sir, precisely I don't know yet. It's probably a bow shock, but it sharpens, fades, twists- I can't classify it.'

'And like a typical slicer, you decided to keep worrying away at the problem by yourself. Tacscan's a more communal business- you are allowed to ask for help. Give me playback.'

Cormall reran the few seconds of sensor log, Lennart and Rythanor looking at the holo-projection of the display.

'I see. Or rather I don't.' Rythanor said, fascinated by the apparent paradox. 'It looks like bow shock, but it doesn't smell like one. Interestingly weird. Could be a couple of things-a radically-reconfigurable, polymorphic hull could throw that off, extragalactic aliens; or maybe even a tachyon-bypass distortion-manifold cloaking device-'

He was, of course, speaking in mockery, mouth making noises to keep busy while his brain ran. Lennart pretended not to get it.

'I hate the sound of technobabble. There's a much simpler explanation.'

'Radical evasion.' Rythanor agreed. 'But of what?'

'Something with enough engine power to steer a highly erratic course. Our targets.'

'They're not manoeuvring consistently, so they're not giving a consistent signal. Most scanners would pick up nothing, It's only because we have this that we're detecting anything. Chief - combine and overlay.' Rythanor ordered.

Cormall compressed the sensor data into one image, the two senior officers tried to make sense of it.

'MC-80?' the sensor officer suggested.

'Power profile's wrong.' Lennart decided. 'Two smaller ships.'

He had a pair of laser pointers in one hand, he used them like a pair of chopsticks, converging them to cross the beams at a point, picking out one of the preselected drop points; 'There, and fast.'

'Captain.' Aleph-3's voice from behind him. 'Urgent.' She was wearing the iridiscent red-blue armour, helmet off. Full dress outfit.

'You're not supposed to be on the bridge at battle stations. Is there a reason?' he asked, hackles rising.

'Higher authority's response.' She handed him a datapad.

Message form, the authenticators checked out, there were some interesting bits in the routing he would have to think about later, but it claimed to be from an officer of the privy council. Not good news.

Situation under review, agent dispatched to take oversight, take no further action - withdraw to a rendezvous point. A do-not-engage order.

Lennart took the actual text in at a glance, noted the name - Kor Alric Adannan; made his decision.

'Nav, run her up to point four seven eight, I want to be there before they are. Engage hyperdrive.'

'Captain, the orders, you-' Aleph-3 began, before her brain caught up and she realised that he could and had. 'May I speak with you? Personally?' She said, in a frantic whisper. She looked disturbed - face calm and impassive, but somehow seeming as if the mask was coming loose over whatever was underneath.

Behind her the main viewscreen blurred into a blue-white blizzard.

'As opposed to?' Lennart asked, calmly. There were actually answers to that.

'Captain, please. Understand me. I have a lot to explain, and I'm going to find this difficult enough already.' She said, controlling herself with difficulty. She gestured vaguely to the accessway off the bridge; he motioned to her to lead on.

Some ship's business to sort out first.

'Guns, I'm expecting a couple of old friends for a party. I think at least one of the inbounds is a Recusant.'

'Aye, Aye, Sir. Any special instructions?' Wathavrah answered.

'If you take out the rest of it with the bow heavies intact, you can keep them to play with.' Lennart informed him over the comlink, and turned to Rythanor, still studying the developing image. 'Deduct that, and I think we're left with a light destroyer.'

'Too sharp to be a Bulwark- renegade Imperial type? That why we're rushing to get there first?' Rythanor guessed, accurately.

'Planning for the worst case. I have no intention of emerging from hyperspace into the kill zone of a Vic-I.'

Aleph-3 was looking pointedly at him from the bridge accessway; he took a deep breath, walked off the bridge, the blast door slid shut behind him.

'From the very fact you think you have something to explain to me, I can guess much of it, I think.' Lennart said to her.

'I-' she took a deep breath. 'A high proportion of my - brood - found their way into positions like this, jobs…tangential to the Force, because we do tend to display a certain - sensitivity. Woman's intuition, the male Kaminoans called it until we were old enough to threaten to rip their testes off.'

'Are you trying to tell me that you, a clonetrooper, have the Force?' Lennart said, not seriously - postponing the real problem.

'How I wish I could!' her eyes flashed. 'I'm trying to tell you that you do. I have a tiny, tiny spark of talent - more theoretical knowledge of the Force than almost any Jedi Master, and far more target's-eye experience than most live through; but I have just enough danger sense and instinct to make me doubt my own judgement, just enough contact with others to make me hear faint whispers that half-convince me I am going mad, enough control over my own metabolism that the medics need half a spoonful less in the bacta tank each time, and I can telekinetically lift a hundred credit chit, any higher denomination and the weight of the electrons would be too much. I think part of the reason I am a skilled hunter of Jedi is sheer envy.'

Lennart took that in his stride. He was more concerned about something else. 'So it was you who mistook simple tactical dexterity for ancient sorcerer's ways.' Even at a moment like this, of revelation and betrayal, he couldn't keep his tongue entirely out of his cheek. That attitude was one of the things that had helped there be so few of them; but it looked as if that strategy had just imploded.

'No mistake. Every test proves it - you are a powerful but untrained sensitive and precognitive. Do you know why you have escaped notice for so long?'

'I take it that by this stage, protestations of innocence are completely useless?'

'Galactic Spirit rot you, Jorian Lennart, why the kriff can't you get angry with me?' she yelled at him. 'I betrayed you, I sold you, and you stand there - quipping, as if nothing was wrong.'

'Clearly by your own standards, nothing is.'

'Not mine. The council's. The acolyte's and adept's. The "I"ness that this unit was forbidden.'

'Do I have nothing useful to say on the subject? He asked, again driving her nearly insane with his undemonstrativeness. 'Shouldn't I have been hearing these voices, seeing these visions in the mind's eye?'

'I have no idea what goes on in your head.' She snapped at him. 'Twenty years - you avoided being identified as a sensitive simply because you seemed far too firmly embedded between the oblivious and the disdainful, of the searingly obvious and politically sound, to have any kind of foresight - or any sense - at all.'

'That is probably the most worrying thing you've managed to say so far. That this ship's record matters less than my inability to kiss wrinkled buttock - obscene.'

She moved her hands forward as if to strangle him. 'Aleph, us, we were the first to really consider that you were crazy like a pittin instead of just crazy. If you put the energy into going with the flow that you do now dodging it, you could have been a sector admiral by now.'

'You're half right; I do hate politics.' Lennart said, dryly.

'No, you don't. No man works the system as effectively as you do without being a very competent political technician. '

'In my youth, I was a student radical.' He admitted. 'One of the masked nutters behind the security barriers, throwing flour bombs and rocks at Senators.  
'After Naboo, when we realised what was going to happen, I made a deliberate choice to fight for the Republic I knew, and despised, in hope that the Republic I believed in would emerge, purified, from the fire. Yes, I was that stupid about war then. We all were.  
'And it worked, for me, but not for the Republic; the more the system changed, the more it seemed to stay the same. You once described the republic to me as drowning in its own pus.'

'I did, and I did not know that I was preaching to the converted. Why did you hide that from me?' she asked him.

'From the eyes and voice of the system? An enthusiastic voice, too.'

'But I- we- are the change. We are the proof that it is not the same, that the new order-'

'Perhaps I have simply matured into the same sort of elegant cynic I used to throw bricks at.' Lennart said, world-wearily, and acting.

'You?' she said, looking at his crumpled, stained jersey and battered cap. 'Elegant? Or are you going to claim to have become indifferent to appearances as well?'

'Inversely; a point of principle. I always intended to be followed and obeyed for who I was, not my costume jewellery.' In fact, he had his captain's bars on upside down, she noticed, appalled.

'That is not the way things are supposed to work - that is outright disrespect and defiance of the system. You cannot, you just can't demand the right to spout treason as the system's price to accommodate you.'

'It's worked well enough so far.' He said, flippantly. 'Have we reversed positions on this, or have you simply lost track?'

She took a deep breath and started from the beginning. 'You were identified as a force user and recruitment potential. Kor Adannan has been sent to examine and possibly induct you.' He looked disappointedly at her. He was waiting for her to spell it out explicitly. She did. 'As a dark side adept.'

'What in the void possessed you to think that I might possibly make a good - no, appropriately bad - Sith?'

'Because it was the only thing I could think.' She shouted at him again. 'The only other option was to kill you. Independent use of the Force is - you were there, it was forbidden. The Emperor cannot permit anyone to be seduced and used as a conduit by the so-called Light. Once we knew, it is the one way out, the only way to live.'

'How nice of Adannan, therefore, to begin by offering me a no-win solution.' Lennart said, like a political technician, matter of fact.  
'The choice between practical failure and jeopardising the situation, or disobeying an order - I assume he believes he has oversight authority. Would I be wrong to expect that this recruitment involves some sort of battle of wills?'

'Crushing and rebuilding.' She said. 'Normally. You? I don't know. The aged and corrupt, the young and greedy - they're easily taken. A man already in a position of authority, with some ideals left and what seems a very sideways take on life - the real question is not whether, but how much of yourself you emerge with.'

'You'll understand,' Lennart said, 'if I have my own ideas on the subject.'

'I don't know what you expect to change. You already behave as if you had that kind of authority.' She said, part admiring, part disapproval. Stormtroopers inherited, or had pounded into them, a military sense of neatness along with all the rest.

'So it doesn't seem as if I actually have much to gain by this, does it? Which side are you going to be on?'

Did he realise how important a question that was to her? Possibly.

'I- don't know. It would help if I understood what your side stood for.'

'I think it should be obvious.' He said, deliberately facetious. It came so naturally to her to do the opposite - she was still only starting to comprehend what he hid under that. 'Disappointed-optimist cynicism, political technocracy, a sideways take on life, and half-bricks in the night.  
'I understand that promotion, within the order of the dark side, is on a dead-men's-shoes basis?'

'Good.' She said, without conviction. 'If you-' then realised how cynically he meant it.

'If this truly is inevitable, and I remain unconvinced, then I have no intention of being an easily taken apprentice. Especially not if, as seems to be the case,' Lennart waved the datapad, 'the man is a political fool who knows the Force, mind games and nothing but…you'll excuse me, I have a ship to run.'

'Would you really be prepared to do that?' She said, as he was turning to leave. 'not simply kill in the line of duty, but murder for your own ends?'

'What, you mean just like the stories say a proper Sith is supposed to?' he said with one eyebrow raised, then walked back into the bridge.

There were other people on board with problems of their own. Not as severe as being shanghaied into an order of ancient evil - just a modern one. Of the eleven active squadrons - Nu was awaiting reformation - only five were hyper capable. All of them were being held on board for the short sprint through hyperspace, on thirty-second standby.  
In practise, the fighters were ready; the pilots weren't.

In Epsilon flight bay, they were all standing around, suited but two without helmets. The rest were boggling at Aron and Franjia, trying to work out what to say.  
Aron had made a deliberate effort to avoid learning their names; now he realised he was going to have to. This was inherently bloody absurd; meeting them now, after two messy, bloody operations, as people rather than numbers. Particularly his wingman and the second element leader of his flight. And it did come down to him; he noticed Franjia looking at him expectantly.

'Well, fellow interchangeable components of the system…' he paused, uncertain of how to proceed; decided to be bold. 'Take those kriffing stupid looking hamster helmets off. We're on two minute standby, they take five seconds to put on, no sense wasting life support time.'

Uncertainly, most of them did.

'The senior flight lieutenant and I,' he explained, 'were sent as mock defectors, to pretend to join the Alliance and feed them a load of dreck. It did not go entirely according to plan,' understatement of the year, 'and right now we should be being ultra-cautious, ultra-careful to spout party-line crap at every chance. Kriff it. Let's see any of the securipricks do as much for the empire.  
'Speaking of which, we're strike element. We expect Rebel heavy warships, big targets with big guns to shoot back at us with. So move and shoot, move and shoot. I want explosions. So, in the name of peace, justice and galactic order, let us go cause chaos and blow things up.'

'That would make justice optional, then?' Epsilon Nine- F/Lt Ardrith Yatrock, athletic and poster boy handsome, caught the mood and managed to say. He looked much more like most people's idea of a fighter pilot than the short, stocky Aron. Far too much like it to really be any good, cynics said, but he was competent and a shade ambitious.

'You're in the Starfleet. There ain't no justice.' Aron replied, glancing at the far wall of the bay - still showing the blizzard of blue-white streaks.

'So, what are they like?' Epsilon Two, Zhered Gavrylsk, Aron's wingman, asked. He was an endomorphic yellow man - literally; a near human, his skin was the colour of a ripe lemon. It looked very odd above a flight suit.

'Cynics and believers, fools and heroes, murderers and madmen - just like us, but more obvious about it.' Franjia said.

'What about me?' Epsilon Three, Paludo Kramaner, asked.

'All seven.' Franjia told him, knowing he wouldn't keep count. 'But they fight for their side, and we fight for ours - just as well for the rest of the galaxy. If we weren't in the military, we'd probably all be out robbing banks.'

The rest of the squadron started arguing among themselves at that.

'Nah, security's too tight, everyone expects banks to be robbed. You want to go for small businesses, hit them and get the money before it makes it behind too many walls.'

'Why do I have the feeling that you're speaking from experience?' Franjia asked him.

'Too small, too risky. Fraud is the way to go. Hardly ever prosecuted, and usually a fairly civilised business when they do.' One of the newer replacements, Epsilon Eleven, spoke up. Tall, thin, long-nosed.

'All right. Show of hands. Is there anyone in the squadron who spent their childhood on the right side of the law?' Aron asked. Most of them raised their hands - 'Including the things you never got caught for.' All but three went back down again.

'Let me guess. You took up music late in life.' Franjia asked Paludo, who was claiming to be innocent. 'Otherwise there would be Assault with a Deadly Weapon, at least. By or on, one or the other.'

'What about you, or was that just a pack of poodoo you spun the interrogators?' Aron asked her.

'When I was very young, I spent some time in the, ah, rapid transit sector of the economy. Moving on to air patrol from that was as good a way as any of cleansing the record.' She admitted.

Aron's gut started to twist- 'Tin up, to your fighters.'

It was a magnum launch, everything out except the dropships; the shuttles would form a close defence unit, effectively additional point defence. The stormtrooper and assault transports would join the bomb wing. In that role they operated without their troops - it was too easy a way to squander an infantry platoon. Especially on the older stormtrooper transports, which had had their budget dismembered during construction. They had neither the heavy energy weapons that would have made their attacking role easier or turreted weapons to defend themselves. Minimalist-brutalism, a design intended for mass production.

A Star Destroyer's outfit was supposed to be fifteen of them, two of the far better defended assault transports, and assault shuttles, with short barrel fleet-melee turbolasers, only by appointment. Black Prince ran six, six and two.

Now all any of them really needed was a target. Like their missiles, the fighters could accept help if offered, work alone if need be. They were 'plugged into' Black Prince's sensor picture.

There was some chaos around the planet, Imperial garrison fighters harassing the rebel evacuation transports and fighting a running battle on the fringes of the atmosphere with the rebel fighter screen; there was a strange melee in interplanetary space, looked like a mass antiship strike without a ship in the middle. Two major and a handful of light warships, a half- molten Imperial and a badly chewed Rebel frigate, both of them tumbling out of control, and a couple of Nebulons, one with recent repairs around its lower fin, one identifying out as Chandrilia Rose.

Aron surveyed the battle zone, the afterglow of the many-teraton blast, the litter of fighters and escape pods, and said 'So far, so normal. Where's the fight we were promised?'

'Scan-incoming?' Lennart asked.

'Twin engines, good speed, medium-poor agility.' Rythanor said, referring to the unknown. 'Not Vic-I, unlikely Vic-II, could be Karu or Vic-III, by upper limit it could be an even less agile type - Harrow possibly, give me a moment to sort this out and I'll give you a probability breakdown, but is it possible they could have got hold of a Venator?'

'I do hope so.' The captain grinned. 'Tell the legion to ready the lilypads for ship to ship.'

The nicknamed and unofficial class of dropship had been, officially, retrieved from the outer rim. In actual fact they were a homebrew design, one of Mirannon's pet ideas - virtually nothing but a heatshield, a few engines, a central control pod and the largest shield generators he could find. Ultra-minimalist, they were very vulnerable to interception, a known weakness, but they meant Black Princecould drop a full armoured legion from geosynch orbit in under twenty minutes, hours faster than most.

Loading for antiship meant piling on infantry and light vehicles- speeder bikes, AT-RT and AT-PT walkers - and going for the boarding action. That would be last of all. First things first.

If it was a Venator, best not to send the fighters after it. Thirty-five squadrons would take some beating, and the best way to do it was kill them before they got into the air - hit the ship's flight bays with heavy turbolaser fire.

'Iota, Kappa, finish that –40, Mu cover.' Lennart ordered. 'Flight control - watch that furball. If the rebels break out, detach fighter elements to contain. Tell the rest of the group to clear our alpha arc and await orders.'

They obeyed promptly - small wonder. Black Prince had been at battle stations long since, now all they were waiting for was the enemy. Then -

'Emergence, ten seconds.' The sensors highlighted the emergence point, Lennart gave a final helm order; space began to bend slightly, the flash of re-entry. The enemy was with them.

The Rebel Alliance light star destroyer Kestrel had actually started life as two Recusants, and bits and pieces from a third, the remains of one of thousands of barely recorded outer rim and expansion regions clashes, another note from the constant background rumble of the clone wars. Real military victory was dangerous and expensive, scoring propaganda points was worth the risk, but the most efficient use of the Alliance's fleet assets was to attempt to obtain more fleet assets.

On their most recent outer rim tour Black Prince had netted a healthy score of Rebel grave-robbers, pillaging the wreckage left over from the galaxy's last major war.

It was Fleet Technical Services' job to police up things like that, but they had enough trouble dealing with the ships the Starfleet actually had without worrying about the ones they and their enemies used to have. So much of the flotsam and jetsam remained, unmarked by anyone except the local patrol squadrons - which were themselves, witness the pair of Nebulons, in an easy enough position to be jumped by or defect to the rebels to form another fertile source of fleet assets.

'Main battery, one ripple volley, I want shield depletion. Fighter wing, that's your target. Hit power trunking, hit control nodes.' Lennart highlighted them on the sensor image as he spoke. He knew Recusants very well indeed.

Kestrel had emerged on alert, her fighters out of their faired-on bays but inside the open casing of the long, lean destroyer, shields and jammers up, her two huge bow cannon primed and ready.

Black Prince's gunners beat her to the draw. Some of the turrets fired together, some quad by quad, Port-4 fired rapid sequential barrel by barrel, each shot aimed at the ripples and fluctuations the last raised, forcing it to burn energy stabilising itself, draining out - Kestrel lost ninety percent of her shield energy in the first salvo.

The return fire, a splatter of smaller heavy and medium turbolasers, splashed all over the ship, mostly accurate - the two superheavies spat bright scarlet tracer, one hitting forward of the superstructure, one on the shields of the bridge tower. She was going for the cheap kill, aiming for the command centre.

For the thousand-and-oddth time Lennart wondered if he could get away with sawing the bridge tower off entirely and moving command to somewhere better armoured and less obvious a target, and where to put the ship's offices if he did.

'LTLs, hit the secondaries; main guns check fire, be ready to retarget on the second. Obral, the plan is to let the wing pick this one apart, coordinate your LTL fire with flight ops accordingly. Your next major target is due…'

The second heavy support ship of the distant escort, Penthesilea, had a captain whose sixth sense was in full working order; either that or her com systems were far more advanced than the Imperials expected. Understandable - those ships had been the pride of the republic fleet once.

She delayed her exit, overrunning the intended drop point and flashing back into bradyonic space close to the planet; an old and much patched Venator, painted mainly blue and white. Immediately she began to turn hard to bear, exposing her upper surface and main battery to the Imperator.

'Good. I might actually have something to do.' Lennart said.

Most of the bridge crew knew what he meant. Ntevi asked. 'Captain? What about the frigates?'

'Marginalia. EW, eighty-five offensive, sixty-' designating the Venator as prime target, 'twenty-five.' On the Kestrel. Lennart was speaking in percentages of antenna and antenna-analogue resources and processing power. It was a very aggressive split.

'Gunnery, main battery, port-4.' Lennart said, informing the respective layers of gunnery command that he was giving an order directly to a subcomponent. 'Aldrem; I want a flak burst straddle around Penthesilea. She's close to the planet, I don't trust anyone else to cut it that finely.'

'Aye, aye, Sir.' Aldrem said, signalling for it to be set up- handwaving and pointing at Fendon's board, and failing to think of any banter.

'One, then return to normal operations.'

Penthesilea opened with a slightly staggered torpedo volley - at Comarre. Surprising, but sensible under the circumstances. If that ship had anything like its complement, then any Imperial fighter threat would be so heavily outnumbered as to be a non-event.

The attack on Kestrel would be beaten back - was really almost a breathing space. Kill the smaller Imperial ship, and it reduced to a two-body tactical problem, how to keep Black Prince busy while the rest made their escape.

Sensible, logical, decisive, and quickly thought out. Lennart approved. Of course, it depended on a Venator being able to stand up to an Imperator for a tactically useful period of time.


	18. Chapter 18

Kestrel began to loose her fighter complement; the base Recusant never had such a thing, but the endo-and-exo-skeletal structure made them easily refittable.

There had been something of a cornered-rat effect after the official end of the war as the Confederation Remnants threw away the standard unified template and started modifying. Perhaps, somewhere back in the initial design, that had been the idea; once the confederation had won its independence, a series of plug-in modules under the outer shell to enhance and vary their abilities, fit them for the many duties that came the way of a galactic warship.

That hadn't happened, and the confederation remnants had done everything possible to fight a delaying action, try to make themselves expensive enough for the new Empire to conquer that some kind of peace deal became possible. It seldom had.

Many and various things had been done to Recusant hulls in that strange war after the war, and the Rebellion had inherited the ideas as it had inherited some of the pieces.

Kestrel, amongst her other modifications, carried eight fighter squadrons. One of R-22 Spearheads, said to be a botched mass-market clone of the Aethersprite and also the base development model for the newer, faster rebel A-wing.  
Two squadrons of X-wings and three squadrons of Y, so far so predictable, and two of Clone Wars relics, ARC-170s and more Gauntlets.

'Dreck.' Aron said. 'We hit the turret fighters in pairs, two on one, one after the other.'

'Can we hit one of them with ion cannon? I'd like to take a Gauntlet home to play with.' Franjia said, half serious.

'Kriff, no. No more rebel fighters, no more flight testing, bloody ever.'

'Optimist…Alpha One, Epsilon Five. Reb warhead pointers swinging towards you.'

Olleyri stifled a 'No shit' as his own threat receivers started howling at him. How egotistical was an officer of his rank entitled to be? 'Alpha Lead, we'll draw fire for the rest of the group.' I must have lost it at last, he thought. 'Everyone else, cover us. Don't waste time shooting torps, hit their concussions, then break and attack.'

The four Defenders fired torpedoes blind at the rebel fighter swarm, extreme sensitivity dialled into their fusing - Olleyri wanted them to detonate as they passed the wave of rebel missiles that would surely come their way, and make holes big enough for a Defender to slip through. Hopefully.

The Spearheads actually carried concussions, the rest torpedoes; they and the Y-wings fired at Alpha Lead flight.

Six concussions and eighteen torpedoes each; somebody really didn't like them. Either that or they had lost the plot.

Olleyri spared half a second for sober analysis - the rebs had just pretty much guaranteed that they would lose the opening moves of the fighter battle, by overconcentrating on one element of the formation; good. It happened to be him; bad.

The fighter wing commander was next in line - the bomb and attack/multirole wing commanders flew desks. 'Beta One, you have tactical control until we shake this lot.' He backflipped the Defender and his flight followed, racing away from the torpedoes - they could outrun proton torps, although only by a hair, they couldn't beat a concussion. Until? If.

The rest of the Alliance fighters held their fire, for whatever reason - wanting to save the heads for a ship target, somebody had been too good at warning them against shooting off expensive ordnance - well, that was unlikely in view of their resort to overkill. More likely, they simply didn't believe it was necessary. The Alliance had its arrogances, too - chiefly that of their fighter pilots.

Especially after Yavin, the Alliance Starfighter Corps was very much the tail that wagged the dewback. They believed themselves easily capable of taking on four, five to one odds - and against garrison units, it might have been possible.  
They probably picked on the Defenders because they were the most dangerous; knock off the elite, and the rest would be murder as usual. That seemed to be the theory.

The Alliance formation shook out into a spearhead; backwards, slower Y-wings leading, X-wings and R-22s behind and on the flanks, Gauntlets and –170s at the rear, covering. The Imperial formation changed shape to meet them, reaching out to engulf; the unshielded fighters going wide, Interceptors and Ravagers, the Avengers and Starwings and Hunters fanning out into a loose bowl formation to meet and flank the rebel lead element. In the rear of the formation, STRs sheltered behind the ATRs and assault shuttles.

The Alliance fighter leader realised he had misestimated his opponent just too late to do anything about it. It was difficult to give any fire order to most rebel squadrons other than fire-at-will; sure, they went on about how Yavin had been won with dedication and discipline and Republican military virtue, but those were central command forces, close enough under authority's eye to actually be disciplined. Most rebel line and defence squadrons were guerrillas at heart.

They opened fire raggedly, and early.

The Imperial fighter force went on to individual routines; the break-and-attack order meant that at this stage they would keep rough formation, open out for individual jinking room, and each pilot pick their target and open fire when they thought they had a shot.

Little sense dodging on that frontage; there was so much fire coming in, most of it semi-aimed, almost as likely to fly into a shot as away from one. You manoeuvred to avoid a persistent lock, but the most effective means of self-protection was to shoot back, make them evade, throw their targeting off.

A wall of green and a wall of red light seemed to hit head on and detonate; in fact, that was the torpedo explosions in the middle. Some of them got hit in passing, most flew on chasing Alpha Lead.

The Rebels lost more heavily in the first pass; Avengers against Y-wings, what else was to be expected? It was more than just heads taken, it was position gained - the ability to outmanoeuvre the enemy, force them to begin in evading position, make them flee from you.

So multiple layers, one ready to reinforce the next.

In theory, the X-wings would have swung in on the tails of the Avengers - but the Avengers just left chaos in their wake and ploughed into the second wave, leaving the Y-wings to the Starwing squadrons and calling the fast flanking Interceptors down on the Rebel turret and flexible-gun fighters.

Aron was operating under orders; he would personally have preferred a more compact formation than the loose Starwing pack - he lead A flight through to line up on one of the squadrons of Y-wings, sent C flight wide to hit them from the flank, and Franjia's second flight looped back to cover the rest from the flight of Spearheads she saw peeling off in their direction.

The Spearheads were moving towards lead flight; she headed them off and caught their attention with a long burst that she tracked into one - and was amazed to see it start to come apart. She had thought they were tougher than that.

The three survivors shifted vector towards her - sidestepping in pale imitation of the supreme agility the Aethersprite was famous for. Not nearly as good.

The bigger Starwings actually covered more distance, both sides were squeezing off shot, one looked almost determined to kamikaze on Franjia - rolling in tight little circles round her gunsight. She lined up on him, just off line herself - a shallow curve forcing him to adjust to meet her - expecting a point blank missile shot, she surged power into her jammers, rolled left and over him, and her own launchers coughed out a single torpedo. Overkill.

Epsilon Seven had faked his out, broke across it and let it overshoot, got killing position and lasered it. Six's shields had been chewed but he had nailed his bird too.

They weren't a patch on dear old Dad, she thought irrelevantly as she pivoted her Starwing on its deflectors, the flight conforming, and scanned to see if there were any Y-wings left.

Aron had started by hosing one pair with massed fire - they would share those - but the other six Y-wings roughly opposite them broke formation, accelerated outwards to get lateral distance and ideally be able to crossfire the Starwings. C flight matched their manoeuvre and Aron led lead flight right through the middle. There was method to the madness. He hoped. If Yatrock managed to blindside them - it was all a matter of timing.

He skidded through in a wild, sweeping bank, taking a pair of laser hits, returning fire on one Y-wing, forcing it to break off and burning its shielding out; glance at the scanner, it was just a blizzard. Red and green dots everywhere. The two formations were thoroughly mixed, and his mental horizon had narrowed to a very small space around himself. No time to think about the big picture. This was what the Alliance called the manoeuvring phase, what he called the Mad Scramble.

Epsilon Four had had his shields stripped clean, but only an Ion bolt had gone through; his fighter was limping, one engine misfiring. At least that made him a slightly harder target.

One of the Y-wings was down, Two - Gavryls k- and Three, Kramaner, had taken hits, but not penetrating, and then C flight hit them. Two more of the Y-wings got streamed, long lines of fire chasing them, catching them up and splashing them in flowers of energy. The rest scattered; he looked for and saw engine vents, passed up three closer targets for a good position on one further, Kramaner banked round after the closest, him and Four switching position in the element.

Ahead of him, Aron saw X-wings starbursting out of the way of Interceptors, and rolling dogfights start to form. Beyond them, laser and blaster fire crossed as Franjia and her flight took long shots at the approaching Gauntlets.

They were, tactically speaking, screwed. The ARC-170s had very long barreled guns on pivot mounts, with a crew member who could devote their whole attention to that; it would have suited them best to hang back and on the flanks, use their superior weapon control to snipe and interdict.

Now they were going to have to play it backwards, be the element the scattered rest of the Alliance fighters formed up on. That would make them relatively easy targets.

They didn't intend to make it easy; the shieldless Four was locked on to, forced to evade radically, the streams of blaster fire caught up to him - safe ejection, though. Insofar as anyone could be safe in this maelstrom.

B flight were trading lines of fire with the Gauntlets; with their lighter weapons, the numbers worked that a Starwing would kill a Gauntlet before the Gauntlet could burn through the heavier fighter's shields - if both could get a stable shot.

It was the minor footwork, the slight shifting of position of jousting knights. Franjia's flight were accelerating into the attack, the Gauntlets would have held back if they could, but they needed to accelerate to meet them.

Alpha B and C flights were heading for them also; part of Franjia's motivation was to get them before the Avengers did.

She stabilized on one, dazzled it with active scan, then sideslipped on to its wingmate, level at first then a shallow curve, pivoting around it while her wingman made electronic noise to cover her. It started to roll out of the way as its shields frayed; called for help.

She stayed on target as long as safe, rode the kill down then hauled the Starwing's nose round in a climbing bank, letting the rebel's friends try and avenge him, drawing fire away from the rest of the squadron.

Jerking, spasming quad laser fire came from the follow-up unit of Ravagers, so Aron scattershot at the fleeing Y-wing, rode out the poorly-aimed scatter of ion fire and landed a three round burst that tore the Y-wing's starboard engine off, left the Ys to the Ravagers and ATRs and ordered the rest of the squadron to follow him in support of B flight.

Further afield, the space around the Rebel light star destroyer Penthesilea exploded in green fire. For all his sometimes irregularity, Pellor Aldrem managed his turbolasers with the same clear headed precision the physicists of old devoted to their research accelerators.

He set up four close, hard bursts on the planetward side, tight, brilliant green blooms; four looser billows of flame to voidward - that was how the tracer looked. He watched closely as the Venator's shields reacted.

'Captain, Port-4. I think that if that thing opens its bay doors, I can drill the shielding with a point salvo, get a local burnthrough in seven rounds and detonate a flak burst from the eighth inside their hangar bay.'

'Not yet.' Lennart decided. 'I'll give the word if I want that.' Reminding him not to shoot without authorisation, this time at least.

How were things going to play out now? The initial rebel plan had been for the heavy escort to emerge in open space and sweep in towards the planet. The Recusant had done that and been depleted. One or two more main gun salvoes would finish her off; they only had about eight percent of the power output of an Imperator at baseline. Kestrel looked to have been uprated, but not that far. The main reason he hadn't fried her was to keep the rebels in play, he wanted both of them, captured if possible or destroyed if not.

In the Rebels' shoes, he would back off to medium range, stabilize and recharge as far as possible and use his ship's guns to support the fighter wing in a strike on the Imperial star destroyer. That was what they were trying to do- but it wasn't working. The Rebel fighters had overcommitted, staked everything on a quick victory, lost the bet, and red blips were falling off the scan picture a lot faster than green blips. Four to one, it seemed.

The furball, the original strike on Comarre- the rebel fighters from that would move to support Kestrel's fighters, or intercept the bombers Lennart had dispatched to finish the MC-40, as soon as they cleared away the last of Comarre's TIEs.

Which, they were probably just now starting to realize, would be Aldrem's cue to flak-burst them.

Similarly, the nearly six wings on the Penthesilea might be better off not launching at all. By prolonging the engagement with a fighter battle, they increased the time Black Prince had available to pound their mothership into splinters. The best thing she could do would be to recover the dropships and evacuation transports as fast as she could and get out. The only circumstance it would make sense to sortie in would be if the Rebels couldn't make it out in time, and needed to fight their way clear.

The mothership would have to go onto radical evasion, scattering her fighters along her path, trying to avoid fire and get them clear - a running fight the heavy defence envelope stood a good chance against anyway.

Politically speaking, mission accomplished. He had drawn the rebels out and proved that Sector was hopelessly wrong in their estimates, ascribing one frigate to a force that possessed at least two light destroyers. Now the mission was simply to take heads.

'Guns, Kestrel; she'll remain here as long as the Rebel fighters look as if they have a chance. When she starts to run-' and two superheavy turbolaser bolts splashed into the bridge module's shields; the viewscreen glowed red for a second - 'burn through and take her engines out. And mark my target.'

The Recusant-class simply could not power their weapons to anything like the same rate of fire as an Imperator. They depended on the on mount capacitor banks for any kind of burst fire; Lennart had found that the best tactic was to engage at medium range, burn through the target's shielding as rapidly as possible on the strength of the stored power, but feed the superheavies nothing at all from the main reactor- follow up with the secondaries, the smaller heavies and the mediums, and pick off shields and gun mounts from there.

Lennart would have liked to shoot the capacitors off, but there was too much risk; a volley of HTL shot tended to make a nonsense of most failsafes, and if they ruptured and released, that would break the bow off. Which was plan B.

Lennart put the pointer on power feed and targeting control.

Penthesilea was manoeuvring slowly. She had no choice but to accept boarding from the dropships which had lost their parent craft, which meant she would have to open a bay. Some of them had lost sublight engine capability too. She had to actually make retrieval - which meant stopping Black Prince shooting at her long enough for that. As long as that was going to have to happen anyway, she might as well let the fighters out to play.

Black Prince was keeping up a contemptuously slow fire, lazily posting one turbolaser shot after another into the Venator's shielding, knocking down the walls. The smaller, lower bay opened, the one hidden from fire.

'LTL, gun cluster three, some fire on the dropships please. Make them think we actually are trying to stop them getting away.' Not, Lennart noticed, grinning, that it would actually be necessary.

There was a container left drifting in the middle of that lot, one with their own failed hyperdrive core; there was a rebel tug on route to it. That should prove interesting.

Penthesilea was returning fire as best she could - scared but coping with it, Lennart thought, watching their fire pattern nearly come apart and be recollected. Splashing shot off the Black Prince, which was coping easily with her shields semi-focused on the two attackers.

'Enemy intentions.' Lennart said, chiefly to Brenn and Rythanor. 'How do they expect to get out of this?'

'Splatter fire all over us, get us to start feeling overconfident-' Brenn began.

'Which it certainly looks like we are.' Lennart confirmed.

'Then switch targets, go for converged sheaf component shots, take out above all else the turret that's firing flak bursts, then make a proper battle of it, not just an escape. Try to bury us under five hundred or so fighters.'

'When do you expect that to happen?' Lennart asked the navigator.

'Sir, I'd rather not be specific. I don't trust the universe's sense of timing.'

'Neither do I…' Lennart replied. 'Gunnery, turn Port-3 and -4 over to central control and instruct the crews to move behind bulkhead DF 140, enforce it if necessary. Shields, stand by to reorient - maximum depth over port battery and tower on my mark.'

Aldrem would, of course, bitch about it, which was fine as long as he didn't do it loudly enough to count as disobeying an order. This would be as good a time as any to suddenly sprout proton torpedo tubes, but ideally not at the price of a prime gun team.

Kestrel was stabilizing out and reinforcing her shield envelope, but the LTL barrage had destroyed all four mediums that could bear on Black Prince, and burnt out many of her lighter gun mounts.

Her light-gun focus of fire danced backwards and forwards over Black Prince, shifting aimpoint- now here, playing over the bow to port; jumping to forward of the bridge tower; aft flank, just to search for bare metal; each point of firefall blocked, shield energy following the incoming, fencing almost, slash and parry with multi-megaton rapiers.

And riposte. Black Prince carried her weaponry spread out over a wider area than Kestrel; more room and options to fire back from.

While Kestrel's lighter weapons were splashing power over one place, all the rest were aiming in return, looking for the hole in the shielding, the fire window to lob a bolt down. They were finding it too often for the lighter ship.

Penthesilea had suffered loss of most of her shielding, too; which was what it was for, but in a prolonged duel at close quarters, she would burn out and be pounded to bits long before the Imperator.

She had to perform pickup on the last of the dropships; the time was ripe. Lennart gave the order. 'Shields, reorientation, execute. Gunnery, ripple salvo, as the Venator decelerates, execute.'

The Venator's DBY-827s were actually more powerful than the Imperator-II standard cannon; sixteen of them - combined with the two superheavy turbolasers on the Recusant - lashed out in a time on target salvo.

Which would have been a good idea, maybe even worked, if it had actually hit.

Imperator class destroyers were popularly supposed to be clumsy and collision prone; which was true, to a point. More important was that doctrine stated that in a low-energy collision like a sideswipe, it was better to take the hit rather than turn away and possibly unload thousands of petawatts from the ion drive into the other ship. When their lives depended on it they could move.

Black Prince dipped - autotrack compensating for the ships motion, keeping her own guns on target- and rolled, angling between the two Rebel destroyers, turning it into a full evasive corkscrew.

That was pure showing off. It was the ship control team's boast that it was only fuel cost that stopped them outmanoeuvring most of their own fighters; exaggeration on their part, mostly. They could outrun many things in a straight line, but they were average dogfighters. Perhaps a little better than that, but being a stable gun platform had been more important.

Black Prince rolled and twisted through the sky-burning blasts, took three hits from the closer Kestrel, burnt into but not through the shielding, four from the faster-firing Penthesilea; insignificant.

Then she rolled out into level flight, slowed to a steady thousand gravities, weaving gently, and returned fire in earnest.

The Rebel Venator's captain must have realized that Black Prince was simply shaping the battlefield, firing well below her maximum potential. He must have been prepared for heavy return fire; his ship dipped and accelerated, making herself a crossing target, rolling to present the battery to bear as she ran up to hyperspace insertion.

There was probably a fair bit of praying, religious or not, to Destiny, Karma, the Galactic Spirit, the Force, whichever, that their shields would last. Lennart thought they would - up to a point.

The heavy turbolaser bolts from Black Prince cleaved into and pounded the smaller destroyer.

'Gunnery, send Port- 3 and 4 crews back to station, return the turrets to local control.' Lennart remembered to order.

Penthesilea was emptying her power banks and redlining her reactor, reinforcing her shielding and overdriving the heat dissipators to survive the lash. The rebel captain probably had been intending to conduct a mass fighter strike on the Imperial ship, if possible.

Only if the objective strike had been able to take out their flak-firing main turret, which it hadn't.

Now, they would be thinking, the battered Imperial had left it too late - an old, tired ship with an old, tired captain. Counterattack and a clear flight out would not now be possible, but a mad scramble could still succeed.

Most of the Rebel fighters were hyper capable. They could safely be left to make their own way out. Kestrel was turning to flee, too.

Gunnery remembered the orders they had been given. Lennart had his mouth open to say 'execute' when they did it for him anyway. The four starboard turrets paused, twisted, reoriented on the Kestrel.

Disable her engines, he had said. Being themselves, Gunnery had opted to translate that as 'obliterate'. Better to make a clean, sharp break than leave a half- done job.

Starboard battery bore; medium-power calculated fire to burn clear the shielding, followed rapidly by higher powered shot to blast through the hull.

The engine bells were one of the toughest parts of the ship; gun barrels, engines, reactor casing. Logic suggested the most resistant material for the most demanding job; and so it was. Armour gave some structural strength, but for its main purpose would be needed rarely - if the vessel happened to be unlucky, once. A ship had to be protected from her own energy processes every moment of her life. To disable a ship, oblique shots at the ion engine venturii were actually a pretty good option.

The spaced single shots arced in, smashing thrusters off their mountings, cleaving away fins, tearing apart the aft structure through transmitted shock. Kestrel ceased to accelerate. She was trapped.

Penthesilea survived the attentions of Black Prince's gunners long enough to make the entry to hyperspace. Mirannon, in Main Machinery-1, had one of his holobenches replaying the same main tactical sensor picture Lennart was looking at. He watched with interest, ordered the hyperdrive cores raised a priority level on the power allocation board; they might have to go in chase - this was going to be embarrassing if it didn't go to plan.

Not that it hadn't been done with skill; just that Mirannon was an improviser. He wasn't really happy unless he was doing something far enough out, risky and edgy enough that there was a real chance it wouldn't work.

The hyperspace mine he had improvised from their own failed motivator did not let him down.

The Rebel destroyer appeared as a brief blur on long range scan; that seemed to invert itself, twist, distend - just as he thought it was going to break up completely, and what a very interesting explosion it would make, it flashed again and thudded back into realspace, twisted-looking.

'Captain, take that ship in-' quick glance at the sensor picture, '-no more pieces than it is already, and make their chief engineer a job offer. They did well managing that.'

'Unlikely, considering what I want now is to disable their power grid. Where's the aimpoint for that?' Lennart replied.

'The distribution complex is just aft of the main reactor - there.' He marked it on the target-image of the Venator. 'If you're thinking disable and capture, a better target - more easily repaired afterwards - is the computer core.'

Lennart shook his head. Mirannon couldn't see it, but the tone was enough. 'Intel reasons.'

The Imperators had a central memory core and processing complex that were powerful, but not the be-all and end-all; enough to override a rogue or damaged local system or processing node, but the ship could function without them, once the security measures were satisfied. The Venator class were more centralized than that. The ship could be paralysed by a few hits to the bridge tower but workarounds could be made, local control systems existed. A brain-shot Venator could function, uncoordinatedly; she would lose datalinking between sensors, ESM/ECM and fire control, most importantly, making her an easy kill- but local PD would still probably be enough to prevent capture.

'Gunnery,' Lennart ordered, 'component strike.' Handing over the target image with Mirannon's power system highlights. Black Princerolled to present - gunnery making the formal request to Helm - and the guns lashed out.

Bolts drilling through the depleted shielding and crunching their way into Penthesilea's belly, breaking structures aside until main power distribution was exposed, hammered; it fused and melted, the engines went out, most of the ship's lights did the same.

'Gunnery, Main Battery, Port-4; do you realize why I ordered you out of your turret?' Lennart asked his scalpel team.

'Yes, Sir - but half of us would have preferred to take our chances; the other half were hoping it would get blown up, we still haven't got it fully clean after Port-2 crew's standing watches - what's the job?' Aldrem asked quickly, before the captain could take offence at wasted time.

'Remind me never to transfer you to ship maintenance. Do you think you can hit Penthesilea's bay doors precisely enough to jam or melt them shut, rather than blow them open?' The Captain asked them.

'Yes, Captain, I can.' Aldrem said, almost managing to sound confident. As if flak bursts weren't bad enough. 'Provided you're prepared to sign off for the damage we do to the gun barrels.'

Fendon was already setting it up - not believing it, but doing it anyway. A turbolaser fired a particle beam, in much the same way that a transatmospheric shuttle was descended from a man's dream of flying like the birds. Twenty-five thousand years of evolving countermeasures, the race between defence and attack, had changed and complicated them immensely.

Aldrem wanted a continuous beam, a superlaser effect from a single barrel; continuous containment and the feedback loops it would generate had been known to melt gun tubes from the inside out before this.

At least they had a clear target, albeit tumbling slightly.

Listening carefully to the monitor system, he squeezed the trigger slowly, allowing the beam to build up, looking for the sweet spot - and tracking the beam towards the Venator's bay doors.

On board Penthesilea, they would be frantic, crossconnecting every capacitor bank they could think of to try to get enough power together to get the fighter complement out. It was their last chance of putting up a fight.

The beam seemed to undulate into the joint. Intensity spikes - sudden flares in the beam; blotches of tracer compound; a stitched line of molten hull wandering across the joint line of the bay doors.

Aldrem could smell burning metal. Pure synaesthesia, but - 'Shut down and purge A-1, give me A-2 and prep A-3.' It seemed to be working. If they didn't manage to melt their own turret in the process.

'Captain?' Rythanor - Gun s- com'd to the bridge. 'What would you do if you didn't have a crew prepared to attempt the impossible?'

'Oh, we'd just have to resort to the merely possible, and blow them both to bits.' Lennart said, flippantly. 'Speaking of which, I expect to need long range anti-fighter fire in a moment.'

He made a general survey of the battle scene; time to start earning my pay, he thought. By the planet - still some combat as the garrison fighters came up after the initial rebel city strike's survivors, pinning them and preventing them covering Penthesilea. Good, one less worry for the dropships.

The surviving Rebel frigate was no longer doing such a good job of surviving. Two squadrons of TIE bombers had rippled long-range proton fire at it; it was essentially dead, main mass half-molten and tumbling in a cloud of blown off fragments.

The strike was returning to Black Prince, pursued by elements of the fighter swarm that had attacked Comarre Meridian; the rest still busy chasing Comarre's fighters.

Comarre herself had been hit by three of Penthesilea's torpedoes, and was in little better state - not far off destroyed.

Right, Lennart thought. Area clearance. Neither of those rebel ships is going anywhere. Kill the Rebel fighters - and the smaller rebel ships, although one of the Nebulons had already run for it, and what's that?

'That' was a Defender. Alpha Lead flight had managed to outrun the torpedoes, turned to jam and shoot at the concussions, and left one ejected, one crippled and limping back to the fight bay, and one, with a massive vector and only one objective vaguely close to it, charging head on at sixty Rebel fighters.

Lennart cut in the flight control channels; at least one controller was screaming at the berserk fighter, but the only response was a wild yell of 'Banmotherfuckenzai!' Strange; Alpha-2's blip, sounded like Olleyri's voice.

He would have to deal with that later.

The bulk of the Strike Wing was now in the happy situation of chasing a beaten enemy. Epsilon had beaten Delta to it, got in amongst and started culling the ARC-170s; the Gauntlets had been left to the following force of Assault Transports and Shuttles.

Four twin guns on twelve times the power output - or four light turbolasers on fifty times - outclassed twin medium lasers easily.

Eleven had punched out; he had caught and held the attention of three –170s, they coned him- Franjia and Aron got one each, but the third finished him. Blasters had chewed his fighter apart slowly enough that he had a chance to get out. Maybe. The rest of the Alliance fighters scattered, fighting individual duels or being chased down.

Flight control asked him to report status.

'Ten flying, I need two SAR; good condition, ninety percent ordnance. Where do you want us?'

'Defence suppression strikes on Penthesilea, then dropship escort.' Flight Command replied.

'The fleet's getting its money's worth out of us today.' Nine, Yatrock, commented.

'You mean you wouldn't pay to be allowed to do this?' Aron bounced back.

'Defence suppression, I'd gladly pay to be allowed not to do. Not an option, is it? Gamma and Delta are forming up on us.' Franjia said.

'You wanted a rebel fighter to take home? That thing has berth space for thirty-five squadrons of Alliance odds and sods.' Aron pointed out. They were all shaking out into formation, proceeding as ordered. Alpha and Beta were hunting the scattered rebels.

'I know some crack units have kept up a twelve to one ratio- but not all at once.' Kramaner said. He was not a centimeter out of position on Aron's right wing.

'They probably won't be able to get that many into the air.' Franjia said, watching the thin, splotched green line scribbling in the hull of the Venator. 'Probably.'


	19. Chapter 19

'Almost a shame.' Lennart said, looking at the crippled and drifting Kestrel. 'I have fond memories of those things; I'd have liked to bring her in in one piece. LTLs, switch target to Penthesilea, target the hatches.'

'Aye, aye, sir - fond memories? How long did you spend shooting at them?' Wathavrah said in return.

'My last job before I came back to this ship was at the Raithal Academy; I was part of the Black Flag OPFOR, two years in charge of a Recusant teaching humility to snot-nosed cadets.  
'I wouldn't mind keeping one as a personal yacht - there's enough waste space. We could collapse one down far enough to fit in the hangar bay.'

'You want us to start trimming it to size?' Wathavrah asked, joking.

'No, this one's a fluke; normally you wait ages for a Recusant and then four come along at once…' Then, tone of voice changing to indicate it was an actual order, 'put starboard battery on sky sweep in case there are any other surprises. LTLs, support Port-4, then stand by to assist defence suppression, all that can bear on Penthesilea, the rest on Kestrel.'

The other two squadrons of the Bomb Wing were in open order and weaving; the rebels were a wide selection of types, and they were tired. Attacking the Bombers would be their third clash of the day.

Some were fighting mad, some were too tired to think clearly about running away, and most were simply trying to do their duty.

Zeta squadron, riding the rare batch-IIa shielded version of the Interceptor, were covering as best they could; even a thousand 'g' advantage - which they had over some of the slower-accelerating Rebels - wouldn't allow them to be in two places at once.  
Being in one place after another very quickly, that they could do. It wasn't enough. Then a maniacal black thunderbolt plunged into the middle of them.

Olleyri and his wingman had both survived the few of the missile swarm that managed to catch them, but the Group Captain's bird had taken four hits, two of which had been meant for his adjutant. One of which he had intended to. His fighter wasn't destroyed, but it was too badly damaged to take into a fight. Quattiera's was perfectly viable, though, and the TIE flightsuit was EVA capable with a little help from blaster recoil, and the adj owed him, so…

It was Alpha 2's fighter, but it was a middle aged, mid-life crisis suffering pilot in the cockpit. By the usual standards, Antar Olleyri was close to passing from 'venerable' into 'senile old fart' territory. Part of him was furious that they had tried a cheap trick like burying him under a barrage of missiles, part of him blazing mad at missing out on a fight.

He had shot four missiles, ridden two out, realized he had shield energy left and moved into the path of one intended for Quattiera - and been blindsided by the fourth. It was a miracle the engines hadn't come apart, and a tiny bit was terrified at his own mistake. Basically, he was getting too old for this. So, if he was going to hang up his hamster helmet, retire alive or retire dead he was going to go out with a bang.

The rebels switched target from the bombers to him; he danced and twisted through the fire they sent his way until it looked as if his Defender was unrolling a red carpet behind it. He had not lost his common sense; he had thrown it away, but his tactical judgement was unimpaired.

He flew a wild, jagged, zig-zagging path towards the gaggle of Alliance fighters, and took three of them out before as much as firing a shot. One Z-95 wandered across a Y-wing's focus of fire and was shredded; a Gauntlet and a T-wing sideswiped each other - smashing the Gauntlet's cockpit open and ripping two thruster pods off the T-wing. His first touch of the trigger was on the Y-wing whose pilot was still half in shock, seeing a friendly fighter explode under his guns. Olleyri's first salvo hit together and incinerated him.

He dropped into a less radical weave, held down his finger on the trigger and used the deflection controls to hose the focus of fire across the rebel swarm, barely aimed - enough to make some of them flinch.

Closest approach, and he plunged straight through the rebel formation, rolling round a –95 that tried to ram him, catching an X-wing in the tail flare of his thrusters and he got a brief glimpse of the R2 unit melting - there was no method at all to the madness, just taking it as far as it went.

This is the sort of thing that young fighter pilots dream of being able to do, the three brain cells not directly committed thought. The sort of stunt that appears - and belongs - firmly on holovid. The sort of thing most of the Rebels actually thought was possible to get away with.

He had too much speed to dogfight; all he could do was to strafe his way through them - giving and taking hits as he went; the local force craft, what were left of them, threw out enough blaster fire to catch something moving even as fast as he was, so they were his main targets in return.

Yaw, drift sideways, force himself to wait for the target pointer to light up, full six-gun blast-detonation. Got it. Out of short range leaving a shattered formation in his wake, turn, spray fire at them and thrust back towards them for a second pass over the scattering cloud of Alliance fighters.

The Interceptors followed in his wake, turning to counterattack; the TIE Bombers accelerated away under their cover to join the rest of the bomb wing moving in on Penthesilea.

Gamma, Delta and Epsilon squadrons were approaching in a compact stream; doctrine. Finger-fours or TIE-v formations at long range, for combat against intercepting fighters, then break to surround and englobe, for a surface and harassment profile. All of them nervously waiting for a swarm of Alliance fighters to boil out of the battered hull, delayed only by probably the longest-distance welding job in galactic history.

'Lead,' Franja said, formally, 'in that position, what would you do?'

'Curse whoever was stupid enough to come up with that in the first place.' Aron replied. 'Blow the "cat flap" open, I suppose.' The smaller flap set within the main bay doors.

'Ten seconds?' She asked.

'Fifteen.' He said, and waited. 'The backflash if it doesn't work-'

There was a thermal bloom on the surface of the smaller set of doors. Torpedo hits. Two - no, three centrepoints, and the door remained closed - glowing slightly, though.

'Somebody just made themselves an ace in the Imperial Starfighter Corps.' Epsilon 3 commented.

'Jealous?' Franjia said.

'Kriff yes. How many people have over four hundred kills?'

'A handful from the Clone Wars, not many more recent - when you're fighting against numbers that large, someone's bound to be lucky enough to rack up that kind of score before the odds catch up with her.' Franjia said.

There was a strange click on the comnet; she guessed Aron had been about to call her on that, then decided he might be tempting fate.

He waited a second and said 'If they had any sense setting that up, most of them would have been in the bays. They would be shielded well enough to take that.'

'So it's probably only the trigger-man who got a face full of proton torpedo.' Franjia said.

He had, but was not alone. The hangar was still littered with the scooped-up dropships, many of them now broken and burning; bay shields had been lost on some of the squadron launch slots - some had had their independent-backup power systems drained to try to power the motors to open the door, and the fighters there were broken too.

The survivors started to filter out into the main central chamber, and line up on the hatch to finish the job with lasers. Magnetic shielding had been deactivated - had been shot out, more than anything else - there were no more ricochets.

Gamma, Delta and Epsilon waited for them to emerge, flying lazy, wriggling patterns to keep energy and waste time, drawing off what little energy the turrets had in their capacitor banks and take out the turrets that showed any effective resistance. Watched the gap develop - then turn in towards it.

The lead Rebel fighter element knew it was going to be ambushed. A forlorn hope was the best description; they planned to move out of the narrow, deadly space fast enough to get some through and starburst from there, keep the Imperial fighters occupied and buy time for the rest to exit after them.

The squadron that came burning out of the shredded hatch were Eta-2s. They had been the backbone of the Republic's defence against the hordes of droid fighters - but kilo for kilo and credit for credit, they were less effective than their descendant the TIE Fighter.

As they started to show the three Imperial squadrons rounded on them, hosed the hatch area with fire.

Three Actis blew apart; another crumbled, and the fighter behind it flew into the wreckage; two wasted time stunting and twisting instead of covering distance and the Imperial fire converged on them, one extended in too straight a line and made an easy target - four survived to engage.

Too few for head to head, they meant to break past and strafe round, get into a position where they could score easy kills on the Imperials if they didn't turn to do something about it, break up the imperial formation.

B-flight Gamma broke off to deal with them - the rest remained on mission, splattering shot at the slowly spinning Venator, waiting for more Rebels to emerge.

Gamma's Hunters were interestingly odd; the dominant theory was that they were the result of business warfare, an attempt to regain Sienar's lost monopoly by fulfilling the same need as the Starwing.

The fact that Cygnus was part owned by Sienar didn't necessarily invalidate that; there had been near civil war between arms of the same company before. In fact, they didn't fill the need. The Hunter suffered from the usual poor TIE ergonomics - originally designed for Jedi and Clones, neither of which were very susceptible to physical discomfort or inclined to complain, and in the final analysis expendable anyway, small wonder that comfort had been sacrificed for performance. That made them unsuitable for the long duration patrol role, even if their navigation systems or their sensors  
had been up to it.

Their warhead load was only a half in the later marks, a quarter in the earlier, of the Starwing's; fighter, bomber, recon - one out of three wasn't enough. Some sector fleets used them, most did not.

Black Prince tended to deploy them as close-in escort for the bombers, the role they were fulfilling now.

In armament and agility, they were a pretty close match for the Actis. One of the Rebel fighters died quickly; shocked by the losses they had taken, he hesitated for a moment too long. One of them tracked a rapid burst of light laser fire across a Hunter which made the mistake of going long to evade - the Actis caught it and burnt the shields off, exploded the Hunter. The rebel was still looking for a new target when Franjia pulled a barrel roll, yawed out of it at the top of the roll and splashed the lightly built Actis. Couldn't let the lights have all the fun.

The rebels had enough sense to realize they were entering a shooting gallery; the next unit to run the gauntlet were X-wings. They sprayed fire out of the hole in the hatch before thrusting their way out, scattering fast. Seven of them made it out, and C flights of Delta and Epsilon peeled off after them.

It broke down into open order after that, and a herd of Actis, Nimbus, Spearhead and A-wing interceptors tried to push out. There were three collisions - and that was it, because the bay had rolled round to face Black Prince again.

The flak burst was superbly judged. Lancing through the melee, tracer element showing how the bolt was near to tumbling, splintering on itself and exploding; the rebels saw it coming, couldn't move out fast enough. The bolt cleaved through an A-wing, passed into the hangar cavity - and burst.

The unsealed points in the main doors gapped, the lower hatch burst open, a cone of green fire shone out of the secondary bay doors - tainted with volatilization flares as Rebel fighters burnt up and were carried away as contamination in the plume. The only craft left to launch from Penthesilea were escape pods. She couldn't send power to the guns. Her on-mount power systems were drained. There was no fighter screen left to deploy; as a ship to ship battle, it was over.

'Epsilon, this is Flight Control. Disable, repeat disable, Penthesilea's torpedo launchers.' The last way they had to inflict harm on the Empire - let themselves be boarded and blow up the ship, take as many of the Legion as possible with them. Or simply lob torpedoes at the dropships. The stormtrooper complement was deploying now, under the protection of what of Black Prince's fighter complement could be detached to escort.

Mirannon's lilypads quite literally flatpacked away, control towers mating through unfolding shield/descent platform discs to thruster modules to form the flight article, dismantling for storage - the destroyer could drop an entire armoured regiment in one lift, the complete Legion in four, with far more and heavier close air support thanks to the elimination of the waste space normal dropships would have taken up. They had left the heavy armour behind; each disc carried a mere four platoons of infantry, well below their normal weight-lifting capability, so they moved uncharacteristically quickly.

The easiest way to disable the launchers without setting any of the ordnance off was to burn out the control station. By the time the Alliance fighters realized what was afoot, it was too late.

Penthesilea was close to the standard Venator configuration - no unpleasant surprises like moving the tubes ten metres aft.

Aron looked round; Ten was in trouble - X-wing close on his tail, both of them twisting wildly, rolling round each other; Yatrock was lining up on another X-wing. Ten had moved in to brush the second X off his element leader, and it had gone for him instead.

Some pilots would have broken off to go to help their squadronmate; Aron was lining up his shot. He hammered the Rebel with active sensor pulses, enough to half-blind him and alert anyone with no target of their own.

Gavrylsk curved away after the X-wing; he was converging on the same target as his flight - and squadron - leader anyway.

This sort of melee was either a paradise or a nightmare, and which it was varied sometimes from one second to the next. Nobody had time to think or focus; one could be blindsided from anywhere by anyone, or on the other side of the scales find targets that easily.

Epsilon Three snapshot at the threatening X-wing, blowing an engine off, sending it tumbling away into the void. He knew better than to try to ride a kill down in this maelstrom; break off, go into radical dodge on general principles, look for someone who was stupid enough to do that.

Aron was lined up on one set of control chambers, Franjia on the other; a high power rapid ripple to do any damage to capital ship armour - actually, with the tensors failing, on emergency power at best, spalling and concussion would probably wipe out the crew and wreck the electronics without needing a clean burnthrough.

They had to hit opposite sides of the ship's bow, had to keep enough vector on to avoid being too easy a target; it would take more than one pass - so they overflew the ship and swapped targets, pivoting end for end, drifting backwards and firing at a receding target.

Aron was good at it, Franjia slightly better - but they had started on each other's targets. Franjia caught a glimpse of Epsilon-Six chasing a Spearhead off her tail, drifted over to cover him - deflectors tracking the bolt stream on target; the spearhead broke away, and she wished for an extra hand to work the gun deflector-targeters with.

Close scan; the ship's jammers were silent and the hull broken down far enough that the Starwing's scanners could get a good look inside. They showed ruptured power cells, a sort of fog of splinters, powdered circuitry and red mist in the chamber. Score one for secondary damage effects. Further aft, the pods started to jettison. Most of them would steer for the planet. Flight control ordered them ionized, if possible - they would be easier to scoop up if they could be grabbed before they made re-entry and the occupants had a chance to run.

Franjia was curving away to do that when one of the rebels caught her attention. It was an X-wing, one of the original surface attack group - and he was bearing direct for the Venator's torpedo tubes. Either he was acting on orders they hadn't managed to intercept or he had simply lost it. Her ESM picked up the reflections of the X-wing's active lock on the torpedo bay. She snapped the Starwing round towards him; he broke outside her and slewed round to hold his target - she didn't think the rebels were ruthless enough for that kind of asset denial, blow one of their own ships. At least not yet, not that soon, but that was what this one was trying to do.

She spun round after him; ended up almost on his wing. He had ceased acceleration, drifting, launchers tracking continuously now, about to volley his remaining torpedo load. She yawed and snapshot - hit forward in the long thin nose, and the view from her cockpit turned entirely red; then an irregular black shape came out of the fireball.

The last thing she remembered was her cockpit transparisteel starting to fracture.

'That's it. We have to win.' Lennart said, looking at the tumbling pieces of the MC-40 and comparing them with the human crewed ships.

'Can you imagine what the future would be like with them in government? Everything endlessly debated, if done at all done in the cheapest possible way, with 'can't do this' and 'mustn't do that' and 'too dangerous' bleated at every turn - we might as well start painting the stars grey.'

'Sir, wouldn't the paint just boil off? I mean…' Ntevi began. Lennart glared at him.

'You were intending to report something meaningful before you got sidetracked, weren't you?'

'Is the captain the only one allowed to ramble nonsense on the bridge?' Brenn asked Lennart, not seriously.

'Of course. Privilege of rank. Well?'

'Hyperspace is almost clear, Sir. No high energy contacts, enemy or friendly, civil traffic only. There is one medium-small trace just orbiting - unidentifiable, but estimate is a rebel observer.' Ntevi reported.

'Nav, do you think Commander Mirannon's got around to inventing a way of actually shooting down a ship in hyperspace yet?' Lennart said, only half jokingly.

'Sir,' Brenn replied, 'would it be wrong of me to start praying that he hasn't?'

'Not really, no...Ntevi, keep monitoring that.' Not unexpected, he thought. The rebels now know that this was a trap on a larger scale than they were expecting, and sending, say, a flight of Starwings to wait 'under' it and catch it as it emerged would neither give away or achieve anything.

'Yes, Sir - Captain, cancel that, distant bow shock. Petty Officer Cormall?'

Cormall reoriented the hyperspace scanner, followed onto the faint glimmer the ship's sensors had picked up. 'Yes, sir…evaluation; medium-large, probable light destroyer class, on direct line, running very hot. Flank speed or close to. Too far to be classifiable, estimated arrival - nineteen minutes.'

'We're not expecting further reinforcements, are we, Captain?' Rythanor asked him.

'If we are, I don't want them.' Lennart said. 'Get me a type on that ship as soon as you can.'

Lennart turned away to look at the holoimage of the rebel Venator, and monitor the progress of how rapidly it was turning back into an imperial warship. The stormtroopers were doing well; no reason for them not to, what ground troops the rebels had on that thing would have been billeted near the drop bays.

'Captain, I have an ID. It's the Dynamic.'

Lennart retrieved the message pad Aleph-3 had handed him - only, what, under an hour ago? It felt longer, always did. Checked the message routing. Hmmm.

The fighter battle - battles, really - were going well; what handful of survivors there were from Comarre - it seemed very long ago - were winning, now. The single Defender was flying as if possessed, scattering rebels before it, herding them, choosing and swooping on one of them after another, driving them into confusion and chaos.

Penthesilea was suppressed and the dropships were about to dock on. That promised to be straightforward enough; boarding from one of the lilypads was not simple, but it was fast. The rebel escape pods - some of them had been ionized and caught, some of them would require a surface sweep.

Lennart had not yet made up his own mind about whether the accusation against him was true. That was what it felt like, a criminal charge. These days it so often was. It might be, he had to concede that much; well, this would clarify the issue.

Wathavrah counted down to expected emergence; dead on zero, his former exec's ship, carrying an agent of the privy council, emerged back into realspace.

Lennart awaited the inevitable storm of temper that should result from open defiance of orders. Mysteriously, it failed to arrive. All that did was a call from Dynamic Actual.

'That looks like quite a fight. I'm sorry we got here too late for it.' Was that a message of support? Probably.

'If we'd have known you were coming, we'd have saved you a little one.' Lennart said, dryly. 'You have a VIP?'

'We have an operative of the privy council on board.' Dordd said it with as much inflection as he could reasonably add. Stress on the 'operative'. 'He's interested in you. Personally.'

'Hmm. Recognition in high places.' Lennart said, skeptically. 'You're just serving as transport?'

Dordd's image looked around the bridge, as if checking to see that it was clear. 'Special Assistant Adannan has not confided his plans to me, or to any of my command crew.' Managing to make it clear what he thought of that. And Adannan.

'Put your people on alert, but - how good are your gunners?'

'Benchmark three point two.' Dordd admitted, with a straight face - but how that must have hurt.

'Then tell them to hold their fire, weapons free for point defence only. Especially on anything they don't recognise, like my drop ships. And relax; you're too new in command to be realistically blamed.' Then again, both of them thought, what was there to guarantee that whoever was doing the blaming had any sense of the realistically possible?

Right now, he was responsible for them but not squarely culpable, and wouldn't be unless they failed to improve. In three months' time, whatever was still wrong would be Dordd's fault; that was fair enough.

If Adannan gave them anything like that kind of time. 'Where is the Special Assistant to the Privy Council now?'

'On his way over to you. He has a custom small ship, and likes to arrive unannounced.'

For a brief moment, Lennart seriously thought of a case of 'mistaken identity'; take the opportunity to blow the thing into tiny little bits and solve most of his problems in one zap. Only most. Much as he sensed - no, expected trouble, none of that Jedi gibberish, there would be far too much time for that later - his ship had managed not to perpetrate any blue on blues so far, politics notwithstanding. It was a clear record he intended to maintain, and starting with a senior official of his own government was probably bad business from any angle.

That would be something that even he would find hard to explain away afterward. Perhaps if he understood the situation better, knew who Adannan's supporters and enemies were, he could make a sensible decision as to whether it was worth the risk. Given that he didn't, the only reasonable course seemed to be to play it straight - as far as that remained an option.

The Legion was far understrength, as regarded leg infantry - only eighty platoons, and all but two of them were deploying to board, sixty-four on the dropships, fourteen on the dedicated space to space transports and shuttles. Overstrength, as far as being able to stomp on people's heads with big metal feet was concerned. The reception party would consist largely of vehicle crew. The official reception party, anyway.

'Brenn,' Lennart turned to his navigator, 'the chief threat is no longer the rebels; it is now senior officials on our own side. I'm going to go and deal with that. You have the conn.'

Well, this was the proverbial 'it'. Lennart watched the peculiar dart-shaped transport heading towards the bay with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. OB-173 never could tell when he was serious and when he was whistling in the dark.

If Adannan simply was above the law, it would have been easy. He wasn't; he wielded the power of the law, could use it to gloss over his misdeeds and land hard on everyone else for theirs. Now it was himself under the spotlight.

Why do I hate the idea? He asked himself. It's not as if I didn't know how bad things can get. The Empire may be less corrupt and more energetic than the Republic - there's that - but at some levels, like this Adannan, all that means is energetic corruption.

I didn't join to be above the law, I joined up to stand by the law, Lennart thought; and that sounds too damn much like electioneering for decency.  
I was there, kriff it. I know what the Force does to a man, I met far too many Jedi indistinguishable from zombies, who had sacrificed their personalities on the altar of Detachment. The Force is a curse, not a gift; it sets them apart and corrodes their ties to the rest of lifekind - that far, at least, Palpatine was right. But is it really only one extreme or the other; demented by rage or demented by indifference? Is there no middle ground, where it is possible to be a man, and sane and healthy?

Assuming that's what I actually am at the moment, he remembered to add to himself.

Adannan's transport was on final approach now, preferring to land by repulsors reacting off the ship's own artificial gravity; the honour guard of stormtroopers came to attention as it settled in the bay. And Mirannon standing by the environmental control systems just in case it came to that.

The vicious little ship landed, powered down, dropped its ramp; the crew and officers who had turned out to meet the Privy Council's agent included some of his inner circle, people Lennart might need later, so he wanted them to get a good look at what he was up against.

The first down the landing ramp was a human male in severely-cut civilian clothes, with at least four guns - Lennart would have expected at least two more, more thoroughly hidden. Just behind him was a woman in a dull black robe, hood pushed back - she looked the exact double of Aleph-3, and flaunted it. Clearly she was there to draw a reaction; Lennart controlled his expression carefully, looked closer. Although obviously a clone, not quite an exact double; they had the differences their experiences had made, and those worried him.

Aleph-3 was a soldier, she had stress lines, worry lines, one or two well healed scars - but they tended to disappear, at least fade into the background, when her face was at rest. A troubled mind and a relatively clear conscience. Her duplicate was a courtier; she had an over-polished look, and an underlying sly sleekness. Just a hint of something fouler under the mask, perhaps - a touch of rage and desperation. Why did he send her out first? Lennart wondered. Reconnaissance by fire? She looked at him, evaluating - he refused to take the bait.

The others of Adannan's retinue followed, Lennart looked them over, evaluated them and decided to ignore them for the most part. They were beings, alive and complex, possibly dangerous, probably devious, but important only as mirrors of their master. In at least two and maybe five cases, that would be their literal master, their owner.

Why would Adannan want to be identified as someone who could not only do that, but flaunt it? Intend to begin by making a bad impression? Get over yourself, Lennart thought, this isn't all about me - they're the ones in chains.

Then the man himself emerged. Six centimeters shorter than the Imperial Starfleet officer, and arrogant. Not pompous, he was too malevolent for that, and there was nothing understated about it either. He expected those before him to bow down and worship, and do exactly as they were told. It would be so much easier if they did; it would save him the effort of coercion.

Despite himself, Lennart was frightened of him. So much for theory, he thought. Time to display some of that political talent Aleph-3, currently vibrosabring her way through bulkheads on the Venator, claimed he had.

'Special Assistant Adannan.' Lennart greeted him, not saluting. 'What brings you to Ghorn?'

There were a number of different ways that the dark Jedi could play it. He could be sleekly menacing - looking at him, Lennart would have expected him to enjoy that. He could be openly aggressive - and Lennart's contingency plan for that occasion involved a precise application of thirty-five hundred simulated 'g', if things looked bad enough that the subsequent consequences could go hang.

He had forfeited any opportunity to be deceptively innocuous, walking around in black robes. Instead, he chose to ruin Lennart's plan by doing something completely unexpected. He smiled. There would be a time for threats later; this was politics. 'Well done, Captain. You took exactly the action I was expecting of you.'

Lennart took only half a second to work that out. 'The doctrine is known to history - and most naval academies - as the Greater Order, I believe; when objectives and instructions conflict, go back to first principles.'

'The first principle of the Imperial Starfleet is obedience to orders.' Adannan said, and officially he was right.

'The first order is to fight the enemy.' Lennart said - virtually proclaimed. 'Doing nothing would have resulted in an Alliance propaganda victory- and losses and casualties on our side. Proceeding with the ambush as planned was so obviously the only positive thing to do that even a civilian political advisor managed to realise it.'

Serve and volley; now it was Adannan's turn to think fast about what exactly Lennart meant. Calling the dark Force user a mere political advisor was a calculated insult, a bait it would be dangerous to rise to - had Lennart really intended to be that aggressive as an opening move? Adannan doubted it - but what he was reading from the Captain was something along the lines of 'Go on. Admit that you operate outside the law - and give me all the reason I need to blow you away like the rabid dog you are.'

Alric Adannan was used to being hated - being able to inspire that in others gave him a warm glow. It was the proof that he was doing his job properly. Being loathed was just about par for the course, too. He did not take well to being despised.

'You seem to misunderstand.' Adannan said coldly. 'I am here with the full authority of the council, to bring this matter-' no need to go into too much detail about exactly which matter- 'to a safe and expedient conclusion. The eye of the Empire is on you.'

'I never was much good at amateur dramatics.' Lennart said, changing tone to genial and absurd - largely to cover the engineer officer who muttered something about cataract surgery. 'Centre stage doesn't suit…' he turned that into meaning that the flight bay was not the place for a detailed discussion.

Adannan's first attempt at that line of argument had failed, but it was still worth pursuing. Force choke him, push him to the ground, humble him, make him grovel in front of his crew - that was what he wanted to do, but Lennart was not humble. He would have to be seduced to the dark side, a direct attack would turn into a brawl.

On his own ship, as the appointed champion of forty-six thousand lesser entities to draw strength from, Lennart might prove to be a formidable opponent. That could simply make it more fun - and there was no sense relying on an incompetent acolyte.

There is the distinct possibility that I could lose, Adannan thought. One does not become strong in the dark side by refusing to confront problems; one does not live long enough to become strong without learning to take every possible advantage.

Perhaps I can use his strategy against him. Rely upon the masks of officialdom, while I learn him, compromise his associates, explore his weak points and ripen him for his fall.

'We still have two boarding actions and the tail end of a fighter battle to deal with.' Lennart said.

'I have summoned the system governor, I will convene a command conference in one hour on board this ship.' Adannan stated.

'It would be rather unfortunate for him if there were any fighters left, and a stray X-wing managed to put a proton torp into his shuttle.' Lennart pointed out. 'Is that not a factor?'

'I do have some knowledge of the situation. A little exposure to risk will do him good.' Adannan stated, a subject they could almost agree on. 'I and my retinue will be occupying the imperial suite.'

Another good reason to get the bridge tower blown off one of these days, Lennart thought. The throne room was sealed, and should be in good condition - and there was no real way to keep his minions out of the computer systems.

It was stunningly arrogant that he thought he had a right to; stopping him would - first, it would offend him badly enough to precipitate the crisis they both had been skirting the edge of. Lennart had no real desire to stop him committing lese-majeste, at least not unless he actually meant it, and it was too early to be sure.

An honour guard was arranged - three repulsortank crews. A maintenance detail was also arranged - hand signals to the delegation from the engineering department present - to get there before they did and accomplish any necessary last minute tidying. Adannan's transport was moved off the flight lines to a transport maintenance pad and the parade dispersed. Lennart had one more thing to arrange before returning to the bridge.

M'lanth cautiously opened his eyes. He suspected he wasn't going to like what he saw - and he was right.  
There were peculiar grooves in the ceiling, and faint blue shimmers; a ward, of some kind, with isolation fields active and bulkheads ready to drop. Air smelt stiflingly odourless, scrubbed out of all character.

What - the last thing that had happened to him had been his fighter starting to break up around him. From there to a hospital bed, and unless he had been spectacularly lucky, or someone else had on his behalf... He raised his head, looked around some things both had in common - but the medical officer's uniforms, the hovering droid nurses, and the stormtrooper guards were a giveaway. Kriff.

'You must be M'Lanth.' Someone said. He looked round and saw a handsome auburn-haired woman, in the uniform of an Imperial Starfleet steward.

'Well,' he said, 'I didn't know putting up a fight qualified me for personal service.' Then he took in how sharply she was examining him - which was baffling? Why would an intelligence officer disguise herself as enlisted?

'You're half right.' She said lightly. 'After today, you're small fry - possibly not even worth the trouble of asking questions of. I used to be on your side.'

'What do you mean?' he asked.

He had been caught in the collapsing compensator fields of his fighter as he ejected; he had blacked out almost immediately, and the damage done to him had mostly been put right. He was stiff and sleepy, but that was a lot better than having no spine. His brain was waking up quickly now.

'What it sounds like; I was a former intelligence officer of the Rebel Alliance.'

'Former?' he said, not quite believing it. Not understanding it, either.

'Complicated story.' She said, wondering how closely monitored they were. She was as much being tested here as he was.

'You're a fighter pilot; stunts and tricks, maybe, but lies aren't really part of your war, are they?'

'We listen to subcomm Imperial propaganda from time to time when we're bored and want something to laugh at - we…' he trailed off.

'Eight of them survived. They were lucky. How much of a martyr complex do you have?' She asked him.

'Who?' M'Lanth asked. She handed him a datapad. He read it, briefly.

'They were your people all along, weren't they. Plants.' He meant Aron and Franjia.

Jhareylia nodded. 'Chosen, ordered out and not very good at it, true - how heavily do you hold that against them? Would you refuse, for instance, a gift from them?'

'What sort of gift? Lend me an escape shuttle?' He said, sarcastically.

'Almost. Why do you think I'm not dead?' she asked him.

A few highly insulting things occurred to him to say, and he started to open his mouth - then realized where that would go. He didn't have all that much of a martyr complex, when it came down to it - but perhaps it would be better that way, thinking about what else they could do to him.

'Because you opened your legs?' he said, trying for a quick death.

She flushed in anger, especially because it was almost true. She was about to hit him with something when she realized what he was trying to do; the fact that he looked slightly embarrassed saved him.

'You're not going to get away that easily. I hated the empire, because of - something - it had done; so I threw myself into the fight against it - so much so that I almost didn't notice what the Rebellion was doing for me, or wasn't. Maybe it is no better on the Imperial side of the divide, but the Alliance used me. Paid me a credit a day and got far more than their money's worth - the satisfaction of fighting the good fight was supposed to be enough.'

He knew he was supposed to reply at this point; he decided not to, let her continue.

She did. 'I wanted revenge; blood for blood…and the Alliance never came even close to it. Eventually, what - what wasn't there any more…faded away to a sort of mental amputation.  
'I managed a stable doughnut of a life, around a family shaped hole in the center, and I never really stopped to think, until the Empire did for me what the Alliance couldn't. From their point of view, they enforced the law. From mine, long overdue retribution.  
'I wasn't sure who I was supposed to hate any more, other things happened - and here I am.' That was far from the whole truth, but it was as much as he needed to know.

'I was raised an anarchist. As far as that makes any sense at all. I would never side with the empire; could never, on the empire's terms.' M'Lanth said, determinedly.

'Doesn't that very much depend on the Empire? Captain Lennart is not a vindictive man; it is his duty to deal with you as an enemy, but there's no bile to it, I think he would almost welcome an excuse not to.'

'Anybody who sides with the forces of evil-'

'The Starfleet outnumbers the Alliance fleet - is it fifty or a hundred to one? We, well you, are the odd ones out - so either most of the galaxy is 'evil', or it's the Alliance that needs to explain its extremism to the rest-' her comlink beeped. 'Excuse me.'

The medical instrumentation in the ship's hospital complex was hardened to survive much worse electronic disruption than a mere comlink. Enough room to hold six thousand and treat six hundred; in the early days of the Empire there had been a few hearts and minds tours around the expansion regions and mid-rim, dispensing medical aid and establishing infrastructure. Some of the older members of the gun crews had fond memories of open cast mining by turbolaser, but mainly it was deploying solar power and communication satellites, mineral surveys and mapping. They always had a heavy emphasis on propaganda value, there were very few of them ordered these days and usually only for that.

There were a few ill and injured, but mostly it was empty and being prepared to receive prisoners and wounded stormtroopers. Jhareylia found an empty side ward to answer in. It was the Captain.

'We have a problem.' He began, with no preliminaries. 'I have a particular need for the services of an amateur commando team.' He was trusting that she was managing to keep this private, but also that she was up for whatever it was in the first place.

'And this problem would be?' she asked.

In for a millo, in for a megacredit. 'We've been boarded by a very senior imperial official who makes my skin crawl.' Lennart admitted.

'Most of the bad things you used to believe about the Empire, look at him and you can see them walking and talking. His entourage - high grade thugs mostly, at least two of them don't want to be there. Slaves.  
'Kidnap them, unchain them, get them talking. I need all the information you can manage to find for me. I've no time to give you much in the way of background, I know that doesn't make your situation any easier, but who else am I going to get to make this happen?'

'Technically, I'm a spacewoman-recruit-' she began.

'You think this is remotely legitimate? I know it's a team job; borrow Port-4. If they don't know what's going on already via the ship's grapevine, things are even worse than I thought.'


	20. Chapter 20

Brenn had little to do except watch the situation develop and hope that Dynamic did nothing silly. Captain Dordd had started to move his ship into line abreast, ceased acceleration half way through the manoeuvre, thought about it, and was moving instead to a support position - behind, 'beneath' and inverted with respect to Black Prince. Sensible and appropriate, but her helm team were manoeuvring the Dynamic as if she was made of eggshells. Her captain might have known what he was doing, but the crew - never mind, Brenn thought, associate with us long enough and something's bound to rub off. Just as long as it isn't literally.

He called Engineering. 'Chief? What's going on down on the flight bay?'

'You can stand down the bucket and sponge party.' Mirannon replied. 'No entrails, at least not yet. Skipper pushed his luck about as far as it would go, got away with it for the time being - but there's going to be a round two.'

Brenn thought about that for a moment. 'How much trouble would you say we were in?'

'It was a nice, civilised mutual exchange of death threats. I think it's time to add weapons and combat programming to the maintenance droids, and start running classes in Spanner-Fu again.'

'Run that one by me again? This is an officer of the privy council we're speaking of, yes? For right or wrong, he has oversight authority - he is supposed to be on our side. He might not know tactics, but-'

'He's a Force user.' Mirannon said it as if it was a synonym for "scum." 'Above the law, and beyond rational argument. I know it's repeatable but that still doesn't go far enough to make it respectable. Captain threatened to meet him head on. We're stuck with him now, until something unforeseen happens.'

Mirannon had all sorts of biologically incompatible things in mind, but the same problem occurred to him as it had to Lennart: explaining it afterward. He was still thinking about deniability.

'We're equipped to act as a squadron flagship, true, but what does he want?'

'Look at the logcorder when you have time. Nothing good for us. As long as he follows the regulations, we will too, but "if you forget my rank, Sire, I will forget yours".' Mirannon quoted. 'That still gives him effective control.'

'We were overdue something like this.' Brenn admitted. 'I still prefer to pay Fortune off on the installment plan, not in lump sums - oh, yes, the hyperspace mine. I didn't realise it was capable of doing real damage.' He changed the subject to something that he thought might be less worrying.

'Don't admit this. Deny all knowledge if asked - but the idea was originally looked at as a security-driven failure mode, for hyperdrive motivators on Imperial warships.' Mirannon told him.

'What, you mean a boobytrap?'

'Intended to be remotely triggered to disable fleeing defectors, keep the Starfleet in line. It was never practical; preparing a motivator to switch into that state already reduces the ship's hyper performance, in addition to being glaringly obvious. The only ships that could effectively carry the burden were the ones large enough to have batallion-plus stormtrooper complements anyway.'

'Yes, thinking about them - you work more closely with them; how are they likely to behave under the circumstances?' Brenn asked.

'Their loyalty conditioning defaults to the highest ranking being accessible within the chain of command. That would be Adannan. Don't ask me to do anything about that - robots I can fix, not biorobots.'

That was probably unfair to the stormtroopers, but there was historic truth in it. A junior officer - even one fairly senior on the absolute scale, like, say, a Jedi General - had control over them only as long as a more senior officer, for instance the Supreme Chancellor, chose to step in, and at that point he could order them to do anything, up to and including designating their former commander as one of the enemy.  
Brenn had always wondered about that. Didn't it make their heads hurt? A normal human, even an Imperial Army or Naval trooper, would - all right, could - argue back, try to reach a higher authority yet, stall, fudge, even ignore orders.

Black Prince's wardroom was not exactly political, but Lennart insisted that they at least keep current with what was happening in the galaxy. None of them were entirely blinkered, and at least two department commanders made a hobby of dissecting Imperial propaganda. There had actually been an order to the contrary, forbidding Imperial officers to listen to or quote from certain sources; Brenn wasn't certain whether it was Empire-wide, or merely some sector governor throwing his weight around, because Lennart had shot the message pad and thrown the bits away.

It was more damning than anything our enemies could say, that we dare not listen to the truth because it might destroy our loyalties. Lennart believed, or at least had nailed his colours to the mast by publicly stating that he believed, that it was perfectly possible for an intelligent, well-informed being to wholeheartedly support the Empire.

It had been rather difficult for even a Vice-Admiral to openly oppose that point of view. In private cynicism reigned, as usual - but not for press consumption. Anyway, how many dirty secrets could even a galaxy-spanning Empire have? Enough to impose other, similar orders further down the line, anyway.

All right, the depth of stormtrooper conditioning was probably one of them. Navigation picked up all sorts of little odd jobs related to the ship as a ship rather than a fighting machine, and all sorts of little odd facts came with that.

Brenn was probably better informed than anybody except the captain, and he still considered himself basically loyal; but that state of total, and totally transferable, loyalty escaped him. He simply couldn't comprehend the sort of mental gymnastics they must have to go through for that to happen.

And, like wondering just how many secrets the empire had, a part of him hoped he never got an answer to those questions.

'Brenn, are you all right? You zoned out for a second there.' Mirannon called.

'Sorry, just - thinking.'

'I have the general scan, and we're cycling down to condition-2 here.' Battle alert, not actively engaged. 'If you want to send me an inspection scan of Penthesilea and Kestrel, I can start working out detailed repair estimates.'

'Right, I'll arrange that; can you give me a rough number now?' Brenn wondered if they were going to be here - or alive - long enough for it to matter. Which depended on what Adannan wanted with them.

'Standard sector fleet deepdock, nearest round number; four months on the Recusant, six on the Venator. Should be less for both, but I don't expect any modern Starfleet repair team to know their way around either of them, so that's mallet in one hand, manual in the other.' Mirannon stated.

'We've still got three of those things.' Brenn pointed out - the 'scouting element' of Fleet Destroyer Squadron 851 consisted of Vandal, Venabulum and Varangian, and their fighter screens. Four hundred and twenty fighters each, many of them clone war and third party relics not retained in Imperial service for any other purpose.

Enough of them were independently hyper capable, and it was a practised manoeuvre; jump in to a system, long range scan for navigational purposes, dispatch a swarm of fighters that covered the system in eyes. Very little could hide from a comprehensive blanket like that, and most sector groups that still retained them used them similarly, for 'hot' recon jobs when there was a very good reason to believe there was something there.

One of them could come in handy - that was assuming they weren't going to be the ones doing the hiding.

Loyalties were also worrying Jhareylia. She was far from certain where she stood in the hierarchy of the ship, but they hadn't trusted her with a weapon yet. Which was not that much of a problem considering the people she was on her way to see had lots of them. Unfortunately, 'had' in both the sense of possessing, and in the past tense. She found all of them temporarily stood down and in Subassembly A's bay, examining status monitors, opening tool boxes.

'Hallo, Jhareylia.' Aldrem ducked under an armature, grabbed her and hugged her. 'What's up?'

'Politics, chaos and treachery.' She said. 'How was your day?'

'We…think we might have melted some of the gun tubes.' Aldrem admitted.

' "We?" Nice line in collective responsibility you've got there.' Eddaru Gendrik grumbled, not pausing to look up from a monitor screen - it appeared to be relay data from some kind of RPV actually crawling down one of the barrels. The fact that they had lost enough of the on mount instrumentation to need it indicated that yes, they were going to find a problem.

'Yes, as it happens. We share the credit, we share the blame.' Suluur pointed out.

'Fine, you can take my share of the kills for my share of the 72-hour exercise, or whatever we get landed with this time - umph. Is there a metallurgist in the gun house?' Gendrik said, frowning at the image.

'Deputy Assistant Acting No-one Else Wants the Job.' Tarshkavik waddled over to the monitor, taking control. 'It hasn't just separated out, what's it doing in the gamma - now there's excitation for you. Anyone around here still want children?'

'What have we got?' Aldrem, who as of a week ago had decided he did, looked over and asked.

'Broken nuclei, back pressure from the containment field. Congratulations, gang, we've achieved transmutation. To crap, probably.'

'Then get the RPV out before it fuses to the tube wall and makes our lives even harder.' Gendrik ordered.

'Harder as in hard rads?' Tarshkavik said, moving the little, heavily shielded, drone out of the barrel. 'We can kill that problem, stabilise it using the binding energy tensors to lock them down, but we're talking dismount, replace and send to Tech Services.'

'Right, start that and-' Aldrem began.

'We've got a slightly more urgent problem.' Jhareylia told him.

'The glacis and shields are enough to keep the radiation out.' Aldrem said, hoping that would be an answer, realising it wasn't. 'What sort of urgent problem?'

'You did notice the other destroyer, and the small black ship?' she said.

'Of course. Gunnery control sounded really sceptical when they told us not to shoot it.' Suluur said.

'VIP visitor. A dark acolyte of the Sith, I think.' Jhareylia told them.

'No bloody wonder fire direction weren't too sure.' Aldrem said. 'Never known one of them to be the bearer of good news - do I want to know what this has to do with us, or should I guess the worst?'

'Before we do something this crazy and stupid,' Hruthhal, the subassembly chief whose gun mount hadn't melted, said, 'can we think about it? Whichever way this goes, he is Authority. At least Captain Lennart prefers to make us suffer rather than blowing us away outright, but annoying a dark Force user can cause huge mounds of possibly terminal crap to fall on us from a very great height.'

'Why are you so sure we're about to do something crazy and stupid?' Aldrem asked him.

'Track record? Basically, if we do something to this dark lord, we're backing our own ship against the might of the Empire.' He didn't add what he was thinking, which was 'on the say-so of a very recently ex-Rebel, yet.'

'I thought we were supposed to be the might of the Empire.' Gendrik said. 'What exactly do you want to do?' he asked Jhareylia.

'Not me; the Captain. And his exact words were, I need all the information you can get for me, who else am I going to get to make this happen?'

'Anybody? We did a week of basic training. All right, they were twenty hour days, that doesn't make us commandos. We're certainly not up to the job of assassinating Mini-Vader. Especially not through the stormtroopers he can't trust anymore. Even if we should. Do it openly and we're renegades, and staging an 'accident' with blaster fire doesn't convince like it used to.' Suluur said. He at least probably was credible as a commando, and knew how far they fell short.

'Team, we're probably over-reacting.' Aldrem said, hoping he was right. 'What exactly does the skipper want?'

'This Force user, his name is Adannan, I checked on the way up, has an entourage. At least two of them are outright slaves. Captain Lennart wants them rescued and pumped for all the information they can give us about their master.' Jhareylia told them.

'There are enough pilots daft enough for that sort of job, surely? Don't the flight group have a pool of spares just waiting for someone else to die? Some of them must be stir crazy enough, and their reflexes are probably better.' Hruthhal pointed out.

'Kriff.' Aldrem said. 'I just thought of a perfect excuse for us to be there.'

'You don't want to do this?' Jhareylia asked him, wondering why she was so surprised. On the face of it, it was a dangerously lunatic idea which any sensible person would want nothing to do with. So why had she instinctively assumed he would go with it?

'Do I want to offend a dangerous maniac - dark Force user, pretty much a given really - who's quite likely to consider something like that an act of rebellion? No. Do I think we need to - maybe.'

'We've spent a lot of time, and a lot of watts, on people who thought they knew better than the official chain of command. It might be secret from you,' Gendrik said to Jhareylia, 'but the biggest single threat to the peace of the galaxy isn't the Alliance. It's rogue elements of the Starfleet. We've found ourselves putting down brushfire wars based on hatreds that go back to the dawn of the Republic - and break out again now because we've armed them as part of a Sector Group. Never mind small time Party thugs who should never have been given power in the first place, governors with rushes of blood to the head, would-be successors - we've taken them all on. I don't want to find ourselves on that target list.'

'The question is,' Tarshkavik asked, 'who's off reservation, him or us?'

'What do you mean, maybe?' Fendon asked Aldrem.

'Depends what he intends to do to us. I take it he and the captain didn't get on?' Suluur replied instead.

'Captain Lennart said not.' Jhareylia pointed out. 'If you can access the monitors?'

'Fairly easy. Only difficulty is deciding which fake code to use, who to blame.' Suluur said.

From main turret control, he proceeded to do that - typing it in extra-fast so that Jhareylia wouldn't recognise it was the executive officer's code he used. They watched the security footage.

'Looks like a nasty piece of work.' Hruthhal admitted. 'Still don't want to cross him, though.'

'What's that about obedience to orders?' Fendon inquired.

'Never mind the words, they're both being diplomatic. Look at the body language.' Jhareylia hadn't seen it before either.

'He comes in ready to trample over people, skipper stands up to him, they lock horns once then both back down - why do I suddenly feel between a rock and a hard place? There's going to be more to this, I know it.' Gendrik said.

'Slavery is actually illegal, isn't it?' Fendon asked.

'Yes, but you can try a citizens' arrest on a dark lord if you like, just don't expect us to back you up - I count three in robes, two gunmen, one of them alien, one noncombatant - slicer type? - and two twi'lek slaves.' Aldrem assessed. Three to one odds in their favour. Theoretically.

'He's going to miss anyone we walk off with, what about bagging the slicer?' Gendrik said. 'Theoretically. Much as I'd hate to get caught, I'd hate it even more for a low value target.'

'I think Captain Lennart wants this to look like a deniable escape rather than an obvious kidnapping.' Jhareylia said.

'Team. In all seriousness, now.' Aldrem called them to order - or, depending on what happened, possibly to chaos. 'Do we take the risk and go and do this, or not?'

'Does it really need all of us?' Fendon asked.

'Considering we'd all be complicit, I'd hate to get left behind and be blamed in absentia, so-' Tarshkavik decided.

'Good. Someone's going to have to unleash the poor twi'lek, and I'd have to have to do it all by myself.' Jhareylia said.

'Well, I'm going.' Aldrem said, and Jhareylia smiled at him.

'This had better be a kriffing good plan.' Hruthhal said, admitting he was in.

The boarding action was almost trivially easy, compared to what the Legion were expecting. In Alliance service, such large warships usually operated below establishment on crew, and well below on ground troops. They didn't have so many that they could afford to leave them lying around.

In accordance with established doctrine, it was a multicentric attack - with sufficient superiority of numbers, inflict chaos by attacking from all sides at once, push in on an easier line of approach and make the defender need to counterattack you, tactically defend and inflict losses while the other attack groups moved forward in their turn.

Operational-offensive, tactical-defensive; they had the time to do it properly, now the ship was no longer likely to detonate.

Immediately behind the line infantry were sapper-slicers to seize control of the ship's systems and prevent them being used against the boarders, and disarm any boobytraps; light repeaters up front for bursting through barricades, heavy repeaters bringing up the rear to hold territory taken.

Scout teams raced ahead, through air vents, cable runs and machinery spaces, lift shafts and crawlways to hit the nerve centres of the ship; the main targets were the bridge and computer core.

Hunter Team Omega-17-Blue were not alone in doubting the wisdom of that. Not that they were not viable targets, but that at this stage in the larger operation - which was variously nicknamed Peek-a-Boo, Blue Meanie, Teacup Storm - there might be a distinct advantage in not being too well informed. They were reserve and support for this one; the last main phase of clearance, they had hacked and blasted their way into the base of the Venator's bridge tower, and were waiting to reinforce either of the primary attack groups.

Each of the main assault parties consisted of a boarding platoon led by a specialist team - Omega- 09-Blue, whose normal duties were planetary search and rescue, and Omega-03-Indigo, who tended to do the kind of job that even stormtroopers didn't talk much about. Political assassination and the tactical application of blame. Destabilisation operations.

Lennart gave the Indigos relatively little to do, and they were in quite a bloodthirsty mood - they had more flame projectors, explosive flechette launchers and gas grenades than was strictly establishment. They were going after the ship command bridge module; with luck, they might leave a prisoner alive.

09-Blue would seize the core then divert to the fighter control bridge. It was giving those there time to prepare, time to destroy what information they held - which could be an under-the-table objective, not to find out too much.

It would perhaps have made more sense if 17-Blue and platoon AC11 had gone straight for the fighter control bridge, but apart from anything else, this was a central point that it was logical to take and hold.  
Two platoons of the naval battalion - not navy troopers, Stormtroopers who specialised in ship to ship boarding action - would move in to hold the area if they had to move out to support 09-Blue or 03-Indigo.

In the meantime, they had set up and were guarding an aid station in one of the conference rooms, and the medical officer, who had no-one to treat yet, was passing the time by talking to 17-Blue.

'It must be terrible.' Aleph-3 said. 'Actually wanting to have nothing to do.'

'The Army functions with conscripted civilians, or pays their way through medical school on condition of a term of service; but we couldn't have that in the Corps. It has to be organic; within the Family, you might say.'

'Then - how did you get to be a medical officer?'

'I volunteered for the Stormtrooper Corps, and I was half-way through training as a rifleman when someone in planning took a look at my aptitude scores, decided they needed a surgeon and I would do.' The medical officer said wryly.

'You're not cloned? It must be nice to have parents.' Aleph-3 said, not entirely sure whether she meant it.

'At least a third of the first generation of recruits to the Corps were running away from their families in some way. I think a good many of them thought how nice it must be to be a clone with a billion brothers.' He understated.

'In some ways it's our job to understand, and all of us can pass for normal, but that is acting, it's putting on a mask and conning the average citizens into seeing what they want to see. We've never been able to not stop doing it, we don't know what it's like to have to be that way - you must deal with average people more than most.' Aleph-3 didn't quite manage to say what she meant, but he knew.

'Training was interesting; there are enough of us now to keep it all in house, but I was one of the first generation. I went to a regular medical school, with thousands of junior doctors who knew that our group - twenty - were going to be combat surgeons. They hardly knew how to deal with us; at first, they settled on fear.'

'I would have thought there would be a lot of curiosity in the mix?' Aleph-3 asked, not really surprised.

'There was, but in a lot of ways we were seeing them at their worst. Very high standards were required of them, and they were all in competition with each other; we saw them at their most ridiculous and childish, as they played silly student games to escape from the pressure - and at their most ruthlessly backstabbing, as they tried to eliminate their rivals. We were all young troopers, proud of our status, too raw to hide our contempt for their behaviour. We had a lot of growing up to do, too.'

'So how did the situation develop from there?' Aleph-3 asked, trying to picture it.

'Awkwardly.' The surgeon said. 'We were trained to keep going, to be merciless to the enemy but even more so to ourselves, never rest, never count the cost, never turn aside until the job is done. It turned out to be the best preparation we could have had.  
'Part of being womb-born is to almost never be certain. We have the fog of war, they operate under the fog of life; never sure what's going to happen to them next, always conditional, always dodging; they have very few simplicities, and most of those are when something has gone catastrophically wrong.

'There's another side to that, but we gradually began to pass them by. We were less intelligent, and probably less temperamentally suited, but sheer relentlessness served us well.  
'As we moved up the class ranks, some of them resented us, tried to pull us down, trap us into making mistakes. Others overcame their fear, started coming to us for help and advice. It was fascinating - we were doing our best to behave properly, not letting our opinions interfere with our duty, but we hardly needed to. They projected it onto us anyway. Did you get the same tactical training we did?'

'No.' Aleph-3 answered. 'Basic self defence, staff-officer and special role specific. Advanced close combat and sniper-scout later.'

'So you did get the Second Law of Armed Combat drilled into you.'

'Act on the basis of what you deduce from what you see, not on the basis of what you want and expect to see? Of course.'

'No-one's yet been honest enough to write down a full version of the Laws of Social Combat, but I expect that one of them is going to be that you win by imposing your own version of the laws. In all the chaos of life, they want answers to the unanswerable. Given that there aren't any, they win by getting everyone else to agree they've won by subscribing to the same outlook - overcoming others' skewed, incomplete view of the world with their own.  
'You'd be amazed how easy it is to be somebody completely different, just by having someone different look at you; it's fascinating how much people can read into a rigid-faced helmet. If I was issued a zoo, I could fill it with what they thought we were.' The surgeon-lieutenant said.

All right, she thought, turnabout is fair enough. Now she was the converted being preached to. Admittedly, she had rarely put it as efficiently. They were outsiders, beings with clear purpose, straight lines in a world of scribbled confusion. Which begged the question; why was she trying so hard to turn into one of the scribbles? Because it mattered, who got to tell who else what to do? Because she was half way there already?

She strongly suspected that the donor for her own clone line had been an undiagnosed force-sensitive. As permissive as the shaping and filtering process had been, perhaps a shred of that had leaked through?

'What do you know about- aging?' She asked.

'Planned Obsolescence, you mean? I was involved in that, I was a latecomer to the program. There were no complaints, at the time. The war was over, the Army of One Man had served its purpose and it was time to fade away. At least, that was the theory.  
'When the confederate remnants refused to lie down and die, and the peace of the Empire turned out to be more difficult to establish than the estimates expected, we realised we would be needing them as cadre for a long time yet. We experimented, trying to slow down and normalise the process. With- not complete success. There have been a couple of embarrassing incidents where the Corps did not do as well as expected; the Reslian and Erhynradd incidents for one. Largely because the troopers involved had a biological age in their fifties.

'The best are usually the worst, refusing to give up however creaky they get; add in the effects of stress, strain and injury and there are some of Vader's Fist more fit to ride a zimmer frame than a dropship. The alternative clone lines stabilise more easily than the core template, if that's what you were worried about.'

'Selfish of me,' she admitted, 'but I was. Is it wrong, to want to live?'

'Better than wanting to die.' The surgeon said. 'I presume the standard arguments have worn thin?'

'We are special operations troops.' Aleph-3 said. 'Our arguments come in for more wear and tear than most.'

He was about to reply when there were shuffling and dragging sounds from the corridor ahead. 'Ah, something to do. I think that's your cue, as well.' Eight stormtroopers - two of them wounded and being held up by another two, four of them carrying wounded rebel prisoners.

'Team, Platoon, make ready.' Aleph-One ordered. They did.

'Make sure you disarm all the rebels before sending them back. Holding my own intestines in with one hand and resealing the patient's with the other is not an experience I want to repeat.'

Damage control bunker dorsal-140 was much larger than it needed to be to fulfill its stated duties, which were nominally maintenance and repair of the main sensor, bridge and gunnery control data systems. That was due to its secondary role as a survival shelter in the most populous part of the ship. Lots of electronics, lots of spare space, enough subdivision to be getting on with; it was the perfect place to mount a surveillance operation from.

It was on Lennart's way back to the bridge, so he met the chief there.

'Gethrim, I hope whatever you're doing isn't potentially incriminating.' He said, after the chief had waved him into the bunker.

'Yes, that was one idea I had to sit on. It's exactly the sort of thing he would check for, bugging the Imperial suite means the consequences of getting caught acquire an extra layer of unpleasant, and I think I can manage to be just a little bit subtler than that.'

The chief led the captain back into the bowels of the chamber, through a locked door to a small data station.

Lennart looked at the on screen image, and got it at once. 'That is elegant. Does it work?'

'So far, yes.' Mirannon said. 'Resolution - sky's the limit. Given tuning time, we should be able to pick up individual brain cells firing. Assuming in his case that they do.'

'Through all that background hash? I'm impressed.'

The Chief Engineer's plan was simplicity itself. He regretted that he had an audience who knew most of it already, and who he wouldn't be able to show off explaining to. With so many energy processes, never mind multiple overlapping force fields, starships were electronically noisy places. It was one of the reasons the main sensor units were in domes at the top of the ship, so they could be placed on insulated mountings.

Other noise reduction measures were also taken; chiefly waveguides to channel away - and as far as possible recycle - waste energy, and recording and filtering out stray electromagnetic waves. As sensitive as the main sensor system had to be for clarity over distance, if a source of interference was not baffled, but instead actively searched for, it was childishly easy to isolate and identify.

The best part was that Black Prince's sensor system was non-standard. A relic of having a sensor dome shot off eight years ago; it had been replaced with a dome mount forward of the bridge module. Then the wreckage had been cleared, and the dome replaced properly, but the field expedient had never been removed. There were enough custom solutions and workarounds in the control software for the triple array to make the tap inordinately difficult to spot, impossible to assign blame over. The result was possibly the most expensive microphone in the galaxy.

'You realise this verges on negligence. Failing to carry out proper noise reduction and compensation.' Lennart chuckled slightly. 'How much difference will this actually make to our scan radius?'

'Oh, we should lose…roughly two kilometres off our standard benchmark against an absolute magnitude fifteen target.' The benchmark was in the thousands of light years. Large enough that even in space background clutter became an issue, large enough to pull in signals to make a mockery of any kind of news restriction. 'Do we have any idea what he wants yet?'

'Amongst other things, apparently an apprentice.' Lennart admitted.

'All right,' Mirannon said after a second's thought, 'this is the plan; we fake your death in some embarrassing and ridiculous way-'

'Does it have to be embarrassing? I always wanted to be a hero.' Lennart said, part appalled, part amused.

'Trust me; there has to be an element of farce in this for it to work. You croak in some sort of hideous noodle incident that doesn't just spoil, positively throws a yellow snowball in the face of, your reputation for foresight and luck. That discredits you as a potential Force user, we literally laugh that off. Has to be messy enough to be a closed casket funeral, though. All right, we've got enough people with sick enough senses of humour to run with that.  
'What's left for Adannan to do? He wanders off pursuing whatever demented objective he has in mind, if he really does think you have some kind of collective influence power-'

'I do.' Lennart said quietly. 'It's called being the captain. Go on.'

'Losing that means we can credibly slip far enough below our usual standards to make it make sense for him to go and bother someone else. You're discovered in the bilges, not quite dead and with no memory of the incident, a couple of months later; problem solved.'

'You're not entirely serious, are you?' Lennart asked, not seriously.

'On one thing only; I'd rather get this sorted out with a splatter of custard than a splatter of blood. Playing it straight, at the very, very least, we have to prove that he's lost the plot, and waste him. He's properly trained, he won't make silly mistakes, that'd take some doing. Then hope we get believed afterwards. None of which is sure, certain or painless.  
'At the worst, we get Nar-Shaddaa'd along on some mad-eyed quest to assassinate and replace Darth killed-more-Imperial-officers-than-the-Rebellion-has Vader, or the Emperor himself, while a real security problem, Ord Corban, goes unattended.' Mirannon ranted.

'Are you sure you're not the one with the foresight?' Lennart said.

The medical bay was filling up rapidly. The returning lilypad dropships and transports carried a few of the more seriously wounded stormtroopers - minor wounds dealt with in house - and most of the prisoners needed some form of medical attention. That, and a few ejected pilots.

Most of the bomb wing was recalled to rest and re-arm; that included Epsilon. From the purely military viewpoint, it had been a good day - three fighters down, minor dents on a few more, for at least fifteen kills.

No more than Olleyri was claiming on his own, mind you. Aron shut his engines down, popped the cockpit release and vaulted out in one continuous motion, and sprinted for the med bay.

He had seen Franjia's fighter take a debris hit - six proton torps detonating less than half a kilometre away, with an X-wing to use for shrapnel, small wonder. Her starwing had seemed to come out of it intact, but then he had realised it wasn't under control.

After a moment of pure panic, he had recovered his composure, called in the search-and-rescue, and desperately tried not to think too hard about it as he stayed on mission, hunting down the rest of the Alliance remnants.

It was over now, Alpha and Gamma were flying CAP, Beta were on deep patrol scouting along the rebel line of approach - in this case, the mean line of approach, considering the evasion - and he had nothing to do other than go and see.

They were not happy to see him; casualties of all kinds coming in thick and fast, human and droid doctors working triage as fast as they could. The med bay was above and between the two landing bays, below and forward of the superstructure.

Casualties were shuttled up to it on a cycling lift - Aron rode up with one batch of fifteen rebels, one half-choked from capture foam inhalation, two with sub-lethal gas exposure, most of the rest with broken bones from rifle butts, or blaster wounds.

The two guards assessed him and said nothing; when he got out of the elevator, a medical droid zoomed up to him and shoved a scanner in his face. 'Come on, come on, where does it hurt, snap it up, lots to do, others waiting.'

'Your bedside manner stinks. I'm looking for someone, just admitted-'

'There's nothing wrong with you. Why are you wasting my time?' the droid beeped indignantly.

Aron grabbed its probe arm. 'Who waved this at who else? A droid's more likely to remember; fighter pilot, female, flight lieutenant's rank, one metre eighty-seven, blonde-'

'Too busy. People to see to, let me go-'

'How much help are you going to be to them if you make me rip your arm off and beat your braincase in with it?' Aron snarled.

'My arms have been reinforced to deal with injured Wookie prisoners.' The droid said, with a slight trace of smug.

'You think that's going to stop me trying? Where is Franjia?'

'Let me think.' The droid beeped a little. 'Accessing- theatre nine.'

Aron let it go and ran - hurdling two stretchers and sidestepping another - into the medical complex.

Immediately left and right, ramps and lift shafts, up to high dependency, down to the main wards. Further in on the left, outpatients, on the right, security and medical monitoring. Straight on to the operating theatres.

Two stormtrooper guards stopped him, politely but firmly; he thought of trying to barge past them, realised they would just stun him or punch him out.

The walls weren't transparisteel, some close cousin with controllable opacity - he could almost see in, could make out fuzzy shapes through the sepia tint. A junior doctor - sterilisable plastic medical gown with lieutenant's insignia pinned on - came out, took his mask off, leaned against the wall. He was very pale.

Aron grabbed him by the arms. 'How is she?'

'Not good.' He said, shaking his head. 'You are?'

'Her squadron commander...and her friend. What do you mean, not good? Can I see her?'

'Exactly what happened to her?' the young doctor was already tired and strained.

'Hit an X-wing at point blank, its warhead load went up.'

'Yes, that fits. It would be- safer if you don't go in. You're not sterile. That fits. It was essentially a debris injury; the blast dropped the shielding and a bit of the wreckage hit her cockpit. Part of the gun module.'

Aron suddenly thought of their squadron adjutant. Combusting blaster gas had been responsible for his wounds, hadn't it? 'How bad?'

'The helmet stopped her face melting, and she did exactly the right thing - vented the cockpit to vacuum for ten seconds, blew away the hot gas and cooled the debris, then restored pressure. Third degree burns across most of her chest, most of her ribs broken and one lung, we may need to replace that, but it could have been a lot worse.'

'Galactic spirit…' he said, not sure if it was a curse or a prayer. 'Will she fly again?'

'She's had a severe trauma, and she's in no state to be rushed.' The doctor said, sternly.

'Doc, when it comes to trauma - she lost somebody recently, somebody personally close. Flying helps her focus, helps her maintain. She- needs to be able to do that. The last thing that would be good for her is sick berth time to do nothing but brood. Maybe it is selfish to want her out there covering my back, but you need to fix her. She needs to be able to do that.' Aron said.

The doctor was about to protest, realised how little effect it would have. 'We'll do what we can.'


	21. Chapter 21

'So, what is this amazing infallible master plan?' Tarshkavik, in ordinary uniform instead of his clumping survival suit, asked.

'Oh, good, no pressure.' Aldrem replied.

'Does it have anything to do with these boxes? We're not going to crate them up and carry them off, are we?' Gendrik asked; he was lugging a heavy plasteel crate, portable in the military sense - it had a handle.

'Is that how you would do it?' The turret commander asked.

'Um, Pel?' Jhareylia asked. 'This plan does exist, doesn't it?'

'Ish. Basically, we have a high level VIP on board, so we are going to survey the tower, with these crates of scanning gear, for places where we can afford to mount additional point defence turrets. We are going to be wandering all over the place, lurking from time to time, and making loud, strange electronic noises.' Aldrem revealed.

'Sounds like an average night out on the town.' Suluur said.

'Sounds like a very useful cover; I like it.' Jhareylia said.

'You'd like it less if you had to carry the scanner.' Gendrik grumbled.

'Switch the kriffing thing into travel mode.' Tarshkavik advised.

'Ah.' Gendrik managed to find and activate the repulsor unit. 'I didn't know it had one of those.'

'The stormtrooper teams that usually use these enjoy lifting heavy weights. They also have armour, so it doesn't hurt as much when they drop it on their toes.' Suluur pointed out, with slight sarcasm.

'Why does a scanning unit, a highly sensitive item of equipment, have to be so heavy?' Fendon wondered.

'It isn't; what's heavy is the armoured shell and the shock absorbers, which are there to protect the sensitive parts from the abuse it wouldn't get as much of if it was easier to handle.' Aldrem pointed out.

'Speaking of easy to handle; these twi'lek. We don't know the first thing about them, do we?' Hruthhal said. 'They could leap into our arms, they might be psychonditioned to die before they let anyone set them free.'

'True.' Aldrem agreed. 'The only way we're going to find out is to try it and see.' Now that he was committed, he felt strangely light-headed, free from worry; all that was left was to make it happen.

'That's why you're carrying the light repeater?' Tarshkavik asked, referring to the gun Aldrem was cradling.

'No, I'm carrying it because it makes me feel better. I can use the sight unit to estimate fields of fire, if anyone asks - and I'm fairly sure it can be set for stun.' Aldrem said.

'No, it can't.' Suluur pointed at the fire selector.

'Oh.' Aldrem shrugged. 'Flesh wounds?'

They reached the turbolift cluster at the base of the bridge tower; with the line infantry deployed, internal security was short of bodies. In this situation, they tended to become external security-protecting points where the ship could be boarded from, and choke points. There was a squad at the lift shafts. Aldrem presented his rank cylinder; the stormtroopers, if they queried it at all, would have been told by Gunnery Control that it was legitimate. Jhareylia tried hard not to strangle him.

'The obvious places to begin,' Aldrem said on their way up in the turbolift, 'are the outer surfaces of the tower. We may as well start at the top.'

'There might well be such a thing as beginner's luck, even in this, but there's an obvious logical flaw in a covert op where you have to begin by handing over ID.' Jhareylia said, skeptically.

'You might not believe it from looking at the outside, but we are fairly competent.' Aldrem said. 'Covert was always a pipe dream. Spacewalking - through active shields, into the main sensor picture, looking like a stray boarder - even worse. A credible reason for being there, and officially busy doing something else, is the best we're going to get, really.'

The Imperial suite, as built into every line destroyer or better, was usually a ten thousand cubic metre boondoggle. Palpatine seldom travelled, and when he did was equally likely to play the saviour of the galaxy, trusting in his popularity with his people on board a luxury liner, or ride the biggest, heaviest-gunned battlewagon available in Oversector Imperial Centre.

That, or he did so invisibly. There had been rumours about cloaking devices for decades; in the old Republic fleet, they would have been pointless - the authorities didn't need them and the criminals usually couldn't afford them. In the Clone Wars, the Confederation were mostly too cheap to bother and the Republic…well. The rumours had to come from somewhere, after all.

Generally, some high level official or agent would use the suite, if anyone did. Thousands of destroyers had it installed, locked it down and might as well have thrown away the key. This was the first time anyone had ridden in Black Prince's since she had been built. The maintenance team who got there with maybe five minutes in hand cracked the door seals, gagged on the stale air, looked around and issued a collective chorus of 'Oh stang.' No penetrating damage; but sheer neglect and twenty years' abuse to the ship around it had left it verging on uninhabitable. The independent life support appeared to have failed, that was the first thing that would need putting right.

Twelve men, a standard damage control party under a junior lieutenant, with a cross-section of skills. One man hour to exercise them in. Not nearly enough. The sound of matching feet interrupted them before they had got more than cracking the APU and life support units, testing the wiring and detaching the filters for inspection. The lieutenant called them to attention, thinking, we're in trouble; there was a brief pause, then Adannan himself leapt into the room, lightsaber flourishing and glaring crimson, the huge thug on his right, carbine in one hand and vibro-axe in the other, the thin thug on his left with two disintegrator pistols drawn and ready.

They were expecting assassins, a secret Rebel cell, a rival agent. What they got was a dozen spacemen in dusty overalls, loosely drawn up at attention; who panicked. One fainted, another cowered in a crouch with his arms over his head, two screamed, most took a step back, the lieutenant started quivering uncontrollably.

They deserve to be dismembered anyway for being such cowards, Adannan thought, recognising what he was, or wasn't, up against.

'My lord,' his female aide said from behind him, where she was covering his back, 'They're worthless. If you want to be judged by the quality of your enemies, this would not be good for your reputation.'

In the time he squandered paying attention to her, he could have - actually, that was an idea. 'Say that again, and I will test how many of these interlopers I can hack down in the time I wasted listening to you.'

The tech crew were huddling together; Adannan noticed one of them gripping a hydrospanner. At least one of them wasn't completely useless. 'Sir, we're-' their officer began, stuttering too badly to speak clearly.

'Lord Adannan,' a voice he didn't recognise said, 'that would be - counterproductive.'

Adannan turned round; it was one of the stormtrooper detail, a sargeant-commander by the insignia.

'I didn't ask for your opinion.' Adannan snapped at him.

'I know, Sir, but I can recognise a broken life support unit when I see one.' The sargeant-commander said. 'The tech crew also haven't had time to code the door to you yet, Sir.'

Adannan took a deep breath. Let the red mist clear.

'Why is that important, Sargeant?' his aide asked, before Adannan could vent his irritation.

'I thought you might be interested in breathing, ma'am.'

'Explain.' Adannan ordered.

'The module internal life support is down; disassembled for repair. The connections to main life support are also inoperable. The security systems don't know that you specifically are supposed to be here. When the blast door closes, you will be in a sealed chamber with no air and no exit, Sir.' There was just a tiny part of the sargeant-commander wondering if he should have kept his mouth shut.

Adannan hefted his lightsaber, looking sceptical.

'Sir,' the sargeant said, 'exactly who do you think that door was meant to keep out?'

The dark Jedi thought about it for a second, then roared with laughter. Of course security on one of Palpatine's boltholes would be intended to resist his own nosy apprentices.

'You. Lieutenant. Come here.' Adannan decided to settle that first. The young junior lieutenant obeyed - after one of his team whispered in his ear 'Might as well get it over with, sir, hanging back'll only make it worse.'

He took a step forwards - Adannan's lightsabre lashed out, slicing through his lower jaw. He fell to the ground, burbling wildly and trying to hold it on.

'Ahhh.' Adannan sighed. 'I always feel vaguely disappointed when I have to do that. Maiming and mutilation should be a hobby and relaxation in themselves; it feels like cheating when I actually make it serve a useful purpose.

Next time,' he addressed the writhing junior lieutenant, 'report quickly and clearly; then when I do gut you, it will be for a genuine error rather than a failure to communicate.'

Obviously, he wasn't going to get an acknowledgement.

'You, Sargeant-' he turned to the leader of his escort detail.

'DM343, Lord Adannan.' The sargeant-commander replied.

'You seem unusually well informed.'

'I'm a tanker, Sir, I work with independent closed-environment systems. We were also briefed on security for the Imperial suite.' The sargeant realised he had said too much when Adannan's eyes lit up and the lightsaber tip pointed towards him.

'When?' Adannan growled.

'In the turbolift on the way up, Sir, it was downloaded to us.' The sargeant said very quickly.

Not foresight at all, then, just good staff work. There was something else, perhaps even further wrong; the stormtrooper's reactions on being threatened. They were far too…normal. Line One, Mod One stormtroopers had been near-mindless, until their experiences had individuated them. Tremendously active subconscious of course, perception and reflex, but they had to think before they could remember how to talk at times. This one, and he seemed to be typical of the rest, had been given entirely too much leeway to think about his tasks. It said a lot for Lennart's influence, even untutored, that he could even begin to break down that depth of conditioning. Either that or his personality cult, which if he had done this without benefit of the Force - or with unwitting benefit - made him a major security threat. He could sense the sargeant thinking "how do I get out of this without getting him mad at me, too?"

'Sargeant, this place is clearly a mess. Where were you expecting to give us?' The aide asked.

'This ship has limited flag accommodations; there or the captain's suite, ma'am. Permission to proceed about our duties, Sir?'

'No.' Adannan said. Even his own retinue looked surprised.

'The rest of you, snap to it. And someone take that snivelling thing away.' He pointed with the lightsabre at the lieutenant, still whimpering. 'You, sargeant, have been allowed to think. That is not an approved activity for beings of your kind; it can land you in all sorts of trouble.'

'My lord,' the aide put one hand on his shoulder - of the arm not holding the lightsabre, she wasn't that crazy. 'All sargeant DM343 did was to protect you from-' your own impetuosity, she realised, the saying of which would almost certainly get him, and possibly herself, killed; '-difficulties.' She finished, lamely, knowing Adannan could fill in the blank for himself.

'Then you-no,' he turned to his other robed follower, still with the drawn vibroaxe, 'you, Banaar, talk to the sargeant about his bad habits. Ren,' she hated that shortening of her name, 'find Watcher 22173. Get the whole story.'

The aide, Aleph-3's twin, had no legal name; she simply preferred the archaic Galactic Standard personal name of Laurentia. Naturally, her master declined to call her by it most of the time.

She nodded, realised the suite's data systems were equally unlikely to be functioning, left the suite in search of a working computer node that would understand her priviledged access codes.

The Force works in many ways, from the extremely blatant to the imperceptibly subtle. One of those subtle effects was in play; the choice of personnel to carry the maimed Lieutenant away couldn't have been better, from a certain point of view. The two twi'lek slaves, used to doing ugly, messy jobs, assumed that they would be ordered to do it. They picked up the young officer, one under each arm, helped him hold his jaw on with a lekku, carried him out and set off for the medical complex.

Adannan himself left the rest of his party to settle themselves in, the menials to do the menial labour, and headed to the ready room, where he planned to begin asserting his authority.

Captain Lennart was there already, apparently reliving, in fact reviewing the battle. He was behaving with slightly more decorum; he had his feet propped up on the next chair rather than the table.

'I was impressed that the Imperial suite had remained untouched. Other men in your position, with your record, might have started having delusions of grandeur. Begun to think that they deserved to be rewarded more highly for what they had done - and resolved to take it rather than wait for it to be given them. Did that never cross your mind, Captain?' Adannan probed.

'Call me an old softie if you like,' Lennart began, 'but I do hold to something vaguely recognisable as a variation on the Tarkin Doctrine. Sometimes, less really is more.'

'I find that difficult to believe.' Adannan said, realising he had to tiptoe around criticism of the doctrine that had caught the Emperor's imagination. Assuming that he hadn't given Tarkin the idea in the first place.

'You have done more damage to the Empire's enemies than many men of greater rank and reputation. And after all, what is the ability to inspire fear but a form of reputation?'

'I had a bet with the senior wardroom,' Lennart said, 'on the subject of the Death Star's lifespan. The question was, how long would it be before one of those who fell under its shadow - the planetary and sector governors, the moffs and the admirals - managed to sneak an inside man on board to sabotage the thing? Fear can be a very blunt instrument; friendly fire prone, too.'

Adannan barely heard the last part; his mind was too busy boggling. The sheer level of cheek and sideways thinking that involved - analytical and unbelievably frivolous at the same time - how in the name of the Force did such a creature survive in an Imperial uniform? Perhaps he himself was the answer to that.

There was also the uncomfortable fact that Lennart had a point. Famously, the rebel 'princess' Leia Organa had claimed Tarkin was there to hold Vader's leash - that much of the incident had leaked out. Typical Alliance inaccuracy, the truth was closer to being the other way around. The Dark Lord had been there to stop Tarkin if he had started thinking that he, Tarkin, might look good himself in an Emperor's robe and cowl, and Coruscant might look good in the Death Star's gunsights.  
Under other circumstances, it might have been the elder rather than the younger Skywalker firing a torpedo down an exhaust port.

Then again, if any of the rebels - other than a few special ops maniacs - actually understood the inner workings of the Empire, they might start being able to exploit them effectively.

'I am beginning to understand,' Adannan brought himself under control and said, 'how it is you managed to remain in your present rank for ten years.'

'Which part, the not being promoted or the not being court-martialled?' Lennart asked him, not meaning it. 'Besides, I know at least four sector groups used an attack on the Death Star as their major exercise problem last year.'

'That shows a disturbing lack of faith. Which sector groups?' Adannan asked.

'How about a disturbing lack of forethought? All four eventually resorted to mass fighter attack on pinpoint targets. Mainly the command bridge and the superlaser emitters, nobody actually found the exhaust port, but the principle was there.  
'Why was there no communication between the special projects office of the DMR and the Starfleet? Why did no-one tell them that the actual working navy considered such an attack overwhelmingly probable, or did they simply not listen? How much faith do you think it is wise or safe to have, in people who are too proud to do their jobs properly?'

'Is that a formal accusation?' Adannan asked.

Lennart reacted initially as Adannan had expected - backing off from the brink. Then he changed his mind. 'You were looking for someone's head to put on a forcepike a moment ago, perhaps the only way to protect them - which you expected me to do by backing down, didn't you? - would be to take the problem head on, and prove a charge of incompetence against the Department of Military Research. Do you think you would be rewarded for opening that can of worms?'

'I do not imagine anyone concerned with it would.' Adannan said, glaring at Lennart.

All right, Lennart thought, I probably can goad him badly enough that he snaps and does something psychotic. That might not, however, be a positive development.

'There's another slight technical problem. The governor will not be able to attend; his palace was bombarded to slag, and his elevators don't work through molten rock. Now we could re-invent some dead technology and cobble together a teleporter, or we could go down to the planet and dig him out.'

That was pure coat-trailing, Lennart's trying to find out just how technically ignorant Adannan really was.

The dark Jedi dodged the question, by imposing one of his own. 'He failed in his duty; he doesn't deserve to be rescued. You had dealings with the sector governor and the subsector fleet command previously, did you not?'

Lennart managed to stop himself before thinking 'you callous bastard' too loudly. Instead he said, 'Now you're just trying to impress me with your ruthless determination, aren't you? Whatever you think ought to be done to the man himself - and if being an idiot was punishable by death we'd need to import extragalactic aliens to conduct all the funerals, there'd be few of us left - there's a command and control facility buried down there with him.'

'Good. Then he can attend by hologram.'

Lennart decided to float another test barge. 'In theory, he can also order what's left of the planetary defence forces to come and dig him out; considering it was us that landed him in that mess, though-'

'You don't feel guilty, do you?' Adannan growled, as if he was accusing Lennart of some hideous crime. 'How many years have you served in the Starfleet, and you try to tell me you still feel the slightest shred of remorse?'

'Of course not.' Lennart replied. 'Although it lulls some into a false sense of security when we pretend.' He pretended. Now provided he doesn't call my bluff and ask me to burn the poor sod out, Lennart thought- apparently quietly enough to escape notice.

Instead, Adannan was grinning. It was not a cheerful sight.

'That is the first real sign you have given me that you might be fit for the greater purpose.' Adannan said.

'Apart from accounting for more than a hundred times our own tonnage?' Lennart replied. 'Planetary governor, subsector naval command, sector Moff, we have established links to all of them-' and to some parts of their staff and data setups they don't know about- 'ready to make formal contact.'

At that point, Lennart's command team, less Brenn who was minding the ship - and listening in anyway - began to arrive.

'I did not give permission for them to be here!' Adannan raged.

'Well, this particular 'them' doesn't need or want your permission. Standing orders.' Mirannon said, sitting down - forcing Lennart to move his feet, fast.

Adannan's hand moved towards his sabre. That was a deliberate challenge - but from the strength of his danger sense, one it might not be wise to take up.

'You would be Gethrim Kander Quintus Mirannon? Chief Engineer of this ship?'

'And you would be the troubleshooter from the Privy Council.' Mirannon stood up, made a civil bow - then sat down again.

The alternative prospect, Adannan recognised. Large, heavy - the Force was telling him that Lennart was a fencer, perhaps a plotter, a more subtle threat; Mirannon was the one likely to rage and try to tear him apart. It could be entertaining to provoke the huge engineer, but on the ground of his choosing. On the other hand, there was face to be thought of.

'Are you attempting to demean my authority? Do you not realise what I have the power to do to you?'

'Many things, I'm sure.' The big, bearded man leaned forward. 'And if you have the sense that ought to go with your rank, you'll realise we have a practical job to be getting on with.'

'Mirannon?' Lennart said, tone cautioning- with overtones of mockery. 'That was barely civil.'

He couldn't resist it. 'I'm sorry, Sir, I'll try and do better next time.'

'Look, you mad prankster,' Commander Wathavrah - Guns - said to Mirannon, 'this man speaks with the authority of the Privy Council, next only to His Imperial Majesty. Would you be as casual in the Presence?'

'Well,' Mirannon began, 'I'd like to think I could keep my cool well enough to-'

'But the reality is, probably not. You'd turn into a gibbering wreck like most of us.' Lennart said. Adannan saw another trap.

'You have been introduced to His Majesty?' he asked- instead of 'then why aren't you sufficiently afraid of me?'

'Part of a batch. Representative officers from the fleet after Second Coruscant.' Lennart confirmed. 'Not counting childhood scrapes, that was only the second time I ever had to fight for my life, man to droid rather than ship to ship - we were boarded. I was still half in shock, and the Chancellor looked pretty shaken as well. All formality, no connection.'

Adannan was analysing that fact when first one, then two more holoprojectors came to life. The first was the planetary governor, still in some sort of nightgown, sweating badly.

One was a richly dressed Falleen, looking distinctly annoyed to be disturbed - although he reacted when he saw Adannan, eyes glowing wildly, slight change in skin tone, involuntary puff of pheromones so violent you could almost see the mist around him.

The third was the subsector naval commander, a Vice-Admiral; no-one Lennart recognised, early middle aged, slightly jowly, dark hair. From Elstrand's spilling the beans, Lennart knew that the man was a political appointee, but one who did take some care over his responsibilities. Could be worse.

'I am Kor Alric Adannan, and I am the living word of the Emperor.' Adannan began, glaring at all three of them. The planetary governor wilted almost immediately, and was glad he was under three miles of rock.

The Admiral's holographic image tried to meet Adannan's eyes, lasted a whole two seconds before looking away.

'You have an abscess in the heart of this sector, and I have chosen to give you one last chance to deal with it as you should before I cut them out for you.'

This was the man in full flood, Lennart could feel the satisfaction radiating off him. No-one was stupid enough to answer him. Even the falleen Moff chose not to say anything that might be taken as a challenge.

'The Alliance to Restore the Republic is strong here, how can that be? A blind eye? Mistaken and misbegotten "false sense of security" tactics? Collusion?' the last said with so much venom, the governor blurred out of focus as he jumped away from the projector.

The admiral opened his mouth; Lennart guessed he was about to rat on the Moff, shook his head very slightly. Adannan saw it anyway.

'You were about to say, Admiral?'

'Lord Adannan, that's more than enough, one good chance is all we need.'

Reflexive bootlicking as a survival instinct; and a predator adapted to it. Instantly Adannan thought of a dozen awkward and painful ways he could make the subsector commander regret his words, Lennart could see him do it and winced slightly.

'You had years to make your own chances, and failed to do so. I expect absolute dedication, and absolute success as a result. Only that will entitle you to retain your position.' He paused for effect. 'And life.'

'Governor.' Adannan turned to the nightgown-dressed man. 'Full marks for creative vengeance, minus enough to put your head on the block - also - for total failures of security.'

'Kor Alric.' Lennart said. 'We counted on the planetary governor's creative vengeance and failures of security, as part of the bait for the trap that caught a major Rebel fleet asset.'

'How much respect do you expect me to grant a worm on a hook?' Adannan said. 'Governor, you are dismissed your rank and position. When I can be bothered, I will work my way down your staff until I find someone capable. You are now a civilian trespasser on Imperial property, and any of the men whom your incompetence entombed with you is legally entitled to shoot you.'

The governor started to plead, screamed, ducked and disappeared from the holoviewer, the cameras panned out to the com centre; they saw him try to dodge a blaster bolt and fail. The camera cut out.

'Three seconds? A spineless lot.' Adannan said, coolly. He turned to Lennart. 'You, Captain. The outsider. The battle-hungry madman who refused two orders to disengage, from officers of the Empire far your superior in grade. One of them mine. The man who took it upon himself to expose this nest of rebels and fools.'

'Oh, no. We found the enemy and fought them; but we have not yet even begun to expose and deal with the real mess.' Lennart said, looking away from Adannan to the sector Moff. Trying to gauge just what he knew. Adannan did the same.

The fallen kept his face absolutely impassive, this time; and whatever Adannan sensed in the Force he kept to himself.

'We will discuss your tendency to adhere to the greater order another time. For the moment, I will use this vessel as my flagship. Captain of the Line Lennart, you will assemble a hunting pack. Draw on the local forces, use your judgement as to what is necessary.'

As Lennart and his command team looked at each other and tried to work out what they were going to do next, Adannan turned to the image of the Moff.

'You hold a high rank. Undoubtedly you ascended to it by running roughshod over the bodies of your colleagues and rivals. Trampling on many lesser beings and careers. Equally inevitably, there are many below you who would like to do the same.'

'Undoubtedly. As a member of the college of Moffs, I am entitled to privileges and rights.'

'You really think so?' Adannan smiled a very evil smile. 'You have guards there? Of course. Troopers!'

There was an off camera chorus of 'Yes, Sir?'

'Condign punishment, authority of the privy council. Burn your Moff's legs off up to the knee. Slowly.'

The troopers acknowledged. The Falleen went absolutely white. 'You can't- '

'I can. Do you know why? Because I'm bored. In the midst of all this trouble, I need some light relief, and I think I will find it most entertaining to merely maim you, and then watch you try to plot against me. Carry out your orders.' He added to the moff's guard, and there was a hum of blasters just before he dropped the connection.

Adannan turned to go. 'Make your plans and present them to me.' He said to Lennart. 'And, Captain-'  
'Yes, Kor Adannan?' Lennart said, neutrally.

'I give what I choose to give, and take away what, and when, I choose to take away. And I dislike being predicted.'

The medics were used to patching up injured pilots by now; things like putting members of the same squadron in the same ward were now written into standing orders. Epsilon Four, Five and Eleven were together in one four-bed bay; the remaining bed had half a dozen pilots sitting on it, Aron was pacing up and down. He was waiting for Franjia to recover consciousness; she was wired up to frighteningly many medical monitors, breath mask over her face. She had come out of surgery two hours ago, now.

'That was the simple part.' The surgeon had said. 'Take a tyre pump to the lung, bung in a set of titanium ribs and smother them in artiflesh- trivial. But-'

'She happens to be my friend. Show some respect.' Aron snarled at him.

'I know. I'm sorry. We get stressed occasionally, too. Seriously, it is far easier to rebuild bodies than rebalance the mind's grasp of them. The very speed of it often makes it worse. Shock, confusion - all I can really give you is an educated guess about recovery time, and whether she'll ever fly again. I'd say so, but it's only ever a sure thing after it's happened.'

So here they were, waiting, talking. Four had made a clean eject; the compensators had functioned properly, a sharp but not a crippling gradient on his way out. Eleven had shrapnel wounds - he had managed to seal his suit in time, but one leg was badly slashed. Four was just under observation, basically fine. Eleven was slightly brain-fried from painkillers.

The main topic was a hardcopy printout from the 'defence' section of Galactic News Services - more of a joke than anything else to those actually in the service - which had been torn up, and each of them had a sheet.

"Consortium of manufacturers unveil new procurement proposal" the headline ran.

'So who's in this?' Aron asked. 'It mentions Joraan, Hydrotii, Arakyd, Tagge, Koensayr, Corellian Engineering, Incom, pretty much everyone except Sienar. Procurement of what? Where's the rest of the story?'

'Here.' Gavrylsk handed him a flimsy. 'See if you can read this and manage to believe it.'

Aron tried. 'All right, it's our business, fighters, but this is nuts. Basically, everyone who doesn't make TIEs has hired a consultant, a retired Clone Wars general - and Rebel agent by the sounds of it - to come up with an alternative doctrine for the Starfighter Corps, and they're trying to sell it, along with the fighters they need to make it work.'

'Hello, new toys to play with.' Yatrock said, with tempered enthusiasm.

'What's the scheme?' Kramaner asked.

'Start with Alliance Starfighter Command's wet dreams and work outwards from there…this consultant, headcase by the name of Arikakon Baraka - bloody fish, no wonder - suggests four layers, separate zones of engagement, and separate designs of fighter built for each.' Aron said, believing what he read only because it was so dumb, no-one could have made it up.

'How many separate types do we fly off this ship?' Gavrylsk made it a rhetorical question. 'Ten? Years of working up to that and the tech teams still complain. Dump a menagerie like that on the decks of a ordinary destroyer - total breakdown. Crazy.'

'Oh, it gets worse.' Aron read on. ' "The outer zone consists of operations by detached elements of the fighter wing, manoeuvring in distant support of their carrier vessel." And if that doesn't translate as ass-in-the-breeze, what does?  
'Oh. He's not really talking fighters at all, multi-crew craft, multi-day missions, the likes of Skiprays and customs frigates.  
Forward control platform with parasite high-speed recon fighters, bomber type with multiple turrets, and possible capital missiles on cradle launchers - nice work if you can get it - and a space superiority type, at least they have the grace not to call it a fighter, armed with something like a customs corvette's weapon layout.'

'I see what you mean about rebel fighter-wank. Anything in there that makes sense?' Yatrock asked.

'Maybe. "To avoid excessive loss of capability in the currently dominant zone of combat…" Anyone else feel like beating this armchair aviator on the head with a proton torp?  
'Anyway, the idea is slave-linked drones. Not droids, non-independent, sort of automated wingmen; about the size of a TIE globe without the radiator panels. One manned fighter with maybe four or six drones; they'd do the wolfpack attack missions the TIEs get now.  
'That might be worth seeing. But not if the price is accepting the rest of this. Long range heavies, short hyper range, long duration sublight, all…has this fish-head ever heard the words "Oh kriff where did they come from" spoken in anger? The ships might be good, the scheme is fragile as all Hel.'

'So's the TIE fighter.' Yatrock pointed out.

'Which we have, what, six billion of?' Kramaner said. 'How much would it cost to replace them all?'

'Credits be buggered, it's time something that radical would cost in. Building time, retraining time, for ground crews as well as us-'

Aron stopped in mid-rant. There had been a groan from Franjia's bed.

'I will never…' an electronic voice said faintly, 'be rude about the hamster helmet…ever again.' She was on a respirator system; a vocoder was talking for her. Aron didn't care. He had to think to stop himself hugging her. Not good on a patient with a shiny new ribcage.

'You're conscious. How does it-'

'You say that like…you weren't sure.' She said, looking at him - thanks, relief, something more? 'What…happened?'

'You don't remember?' Thank the Galactic Spirit, she doesn't remember. 'The last X-wing you hit must have had his torps on hair triggers. They all went up together.'

'Don't remember… going after him. I remember thinking the fight was…nearly over. Then blur. How bad?'

Maybe, Aron thought hopefully, she's badly enough concussed that she won't realise it when I try to avoid telling her-

'You lost most of your ribcage.' Yatrock said.

'I was trying to avoid saying that, bantha brain.' Aron snapped at him.

One hand, trailing IV tubes, felt for her chest. Yatrock opened his mouth, Aron glared at him- suspecting him of being about to say 'don't do that, they're not set yet.'

'Don't feel anything.' She said.

'You're still under anaesthetic. Which-'

'You don't want to lie, but the truth is too…ugly to tell.' She said, accurately.

'Is that your brain working, or your fears? Don't give in to them. What you have to do now-' dreck, Aron thought, I'm supposed to be a bloody leader, a man of responsibility. I decided to engage with my pilots as human beings and then this bloody happens. 'What you need to do is get better as fast as possible. It sounds passive, it isn't, there are things you can do, stands you can take-'

'I know. Given that speech myself. I hope you…never have to hear what it sounds like from this end.'

'You're going to get better.' He told her, slightly too desperately. 'You'll be fine.'

'Functional.' She disagreed. 'hands, eyes, all right. Bit in the middle…'

'You'll just have to start wearing thicker jerseys.' Aron managed to come up with a shred of humour.

'Or get wired into…the flight suit permanently.' She suggested.

'Are you trying to get me into trouble? You know it would be unprofessional for me to compliment you on your breasts.' Aron said, and suddenly they were looking into each other's eyes and it wasn't a joke.


	22. Chapter 22

'For some of us, that could have gone better.' Lennart said, calmly. 'Vice-Admiral-'

'Gerlen. Domenic Gerlen. This is not a good day for the Starfleet, Captain.' The vice-admiral said. He was roughly Lennart's own age- which made him young for his rank, but that was only just starting to show a normal curve.

In the chaos of promotion, demotion, political manoeuvring and growth pains that had accompanied the change from Republic to Empire, it had been not unusual to find sixty-year old lieutenants and thirty-year old rear-admirals. The situation was only really settling out a generation later.

There was also the important question of the admiral's own trustworthiness.

'Let me see…one large and one small light destroyer captured, one medium and one light rebel frigate, four corvettes, upwards of five hundred fighters destroyed. The price, a Golan platform, one light corvette and a badly damaged heavy frigate, and fifty fighters - there are thousands of units on the receiving end of hit and run raids who wish they had such days, Admiral.' Lennart said.

'On the absolute scale, for the galaxy, it may have been a victory, but for this sector group it was a disaster.' Admiral Gerlen said, worried and fearful of his future.

'Perhaps a wake up call. Admiral, I know you're not in my direct line of command, but- have you considered the full implications of what Adannan did to your sector governor?'

'He ordered him mutilated and humiliated; how much more full do you want?' Admiral Gerlen asked. Lennart could see his brain begin to function again, but decided to spell it out.

'By making what looks like a classic mistake - he strikes at a prince to wound, rather than kill - he does two things; he begins to build a reputation as a bloodthirsty madman, which he enjoys in itself for the excuses it gives him, and it lays the foundation of a vendetta.'

Half a dozen knee-jerk silly questions passed briefly across Admiral Gerlen's face, and he suppressed them. 'Moff Edro Vlantir Xeale is not a being I would pick for an enemy. If there's a logic behind this that you can see, explain it.'

'Cover. Anything that happens, almost anything, can be conveniently buried behind this mutual hatred Adannan has just invented. Links to organised crime? Evidence planted by one or the other- or the twists and turns of a desperate, hate-driven man. Active ties with the Alliance? A powerful being embarrassed and humiliated by his own side can stoop very low indeed. Deliberate exposure of old, buried scandal? Fabrication and conspiracy theory.' Lennart explained.

'So by simply fiddling the dates, he can cloak all sorts of things with a simple inhuman sacrifice. That is what it'll come to, isn't it?' the admiral asked.

'I would expect anyone who rises to that rank to be competent at such things himself; Moff-Xeale?- shouldn't be an easy target. Adannan intended to humiliate him and infuriate him just enough to make him offer himself as a target at all. Events will show who gets their way out of this, Admiral. Meanwhile, stuck in the crossfire…' Lennart said.

'How long have you known Kor Adannan?'

'Roughly twenty minutes longer than you have, Admiral.' Lennart said, cautiously.

'He murders one man - judicially - humiliates a senior officer of the Empire, offers death threats to another - me! - and positively praises you. Why?' Gerlen asked, suspiciously.

'Because he thinks that I have the potential to become exactly like him.' Lennart decided to admit.

'Stars around. Well, if that sort of rank isn't enough to protect a man, who is safe? If a Moff, a Moff for Sith's sake, can't call his feet his own, what's left? If loyalty is no protection-'

'Admiral,' Lennart cautioned, 'This is politics played for keeps, and I would advise you to wait until all the evidence is in before using the words 'Moff Xeale' and 'Loyal' in the same sentence.  
'Especially, don't fall into the same trap. You, personally, were threatened. Respond to that by functioning professionally and allowing him no excuse, not by letting him unbalance you to the point where you become a political sacrifice as well.'

'Of course, man. I know that. Do you think I can't cope, or something? Ridiculous.'

Perhaps he could, Lennart thought. Badly shocked, he was starting to return- hopefully not to normal.

'This hunting group he requisitioned- I'll give you a regulation battle squadron as escort.' Gerlen decided.

'Not really enough to do the job. As I understand it, Admiral, what Kor Alric Adannan wants is a force at his personal and immediate disposal, large enough to do dirty work without communicating with, or calling for help from, the rest of the fleet. That's a Superiority Systems Force sized task normally, but as a regional support group unit, we have available some slightly different force structures. In particular this, which is what I think would be appropriate to the task.'

Lennart brought up the holoimage of an Objective Pursuit Squadron order of battle.  
It was the regional force equivalent of 'volunteers- you, you and you.' It consisted of four lines, a sweep line heavily laden down with carrier-types, two probe lines capable of recon in force - led by heavy frigates or light destroyers - and a main strike line consisting of an Imperator, two other warships usually heavy frigates, and a picket line and pursuit element.

'That'd gut Third Superiority Fleet, it'd eat the middle out, we couldn't put that together-' Gerlen objected.

'Interesting idea. Are you explicitly betting that if I have to go back to Adannan with this, tell him about your official view that this is undoable, that he'd land more heavily on me than he would on you?' Lennart suggested.

Gerlen weighed the odds, thought of Xeale's feet. He made one more objection.  
'It should be down to the local force to recover lost opportunities. I don't see the sense of demanding that that is our part, and simultaneously that we release enough forces to him to do it all himself.'

'Then act in competition, Admiral.' Lennart said, wondering just how dishonest and self-serving he could get away with being. 'He came across as a mad dog, but I think he knows better than that. His license to spill blood is the same as, for instance, Lord Vader's; the greater good of the Empire.  
'Failures, he has no bag limit on, but his own head stands to roll if he takes down too many competent men. So give him that, and then go and prove him wrong by finding and killing yourself some Rebels.'

Gerlen nodded. Lennart continued 'Sir, no doubt you have a lot of thinking to do. If we can get the details sorted out with your staff-'

'Yes, yes. Wait a moment.' The connection shifted to a holding screen, the sector group logo. Lennart muted the pickup.

'What do we want?' Lennart said, leaning back, putting his feet on the desk. 'In particular- the Dynamic. Yes or no?'

'They have a lot to learn, but that leaves them less to unlearn. In theory.' Brenn suggested. 'Have her assigned as one of our seconds in the strike line, where we can keep an eye on her.'

'Dig out the sector and subsector orders of battle.' Lennart asked him. 'See what else we can poach.'

'Skipper,' Mirannon said, 'we have a moderately serviceable Venator that only needs-' he looked down at his notes- 'four point six million man hours of work.'

'About the same as it would take to forge a working relationship between you and Adannan, then.' Lennart said, sounding annoyed. 'I know, you're a mechanical engineer, not a social engineer, but did you really have to taunt him like that? Come damn close, and I can't work out why he didn't, to giving him an excuse to lash out at you?'

'The fact that it worked doesn't make me particularly happy either.' Mirannon admitted. 'I pushed it for the same reason you did; testing out just what we could get away with. Why did we?'

'I think we can assume it was a conscious decision, for a deliberate reason. He needs us for- something.' The rest of the command team would be told about the side feed from the main domes, but not here.

'Wait for the situation to develop as to what. That, and those unarmed combat classes the engineering department was running, reinstate them.'

'If by "unarmed" you mean "every hand tool known to man and a few others we invented for the fun of it", already done.' Mirannon said.

'Good. I wonder what the Admiral's telling his staff?' Lennart said- it was taking too long.

'Captain of the Line, Exalted Sir, I have the breakdown on the sector OB now.' Brenn com'd from the bridge.

'Is that so? Well, you just make sure that the accounting office knows too. If I'm going to play junior flag officer then, by the Five Sisters, I am not going to miss out on the going rate for the job.' Lennart said. 'What have we got?'

Vineland was a small sector with a lot of through trade, and the Sector Group had been 'astrographically corrected' to take that into account. Lesser in size overall- with many understrength commands rather than fewer full strength units, a case of jobs for the boys? Heavily balanced towards light-medium ships, a lot of older heavy corvette types, only a dozen Imperators- Lennart still used the older term. Gerlen was right; that wouldn't leave much of third fleet.

The holodisplay changed to a view of a conference table; six staff officers with the same order of battle. One Captain, five Commanders or Lieutenant-Commanders.

'Captain Lennart,' the most senior of them began, 'we have been informed of your intentions. We-'

'Four destroyers, and we have two of them already. You have a Venator-class operating as a training carrier, do you not? An exchange. Assign her to us, you can have Penthesilea. Damaged, but not beyond repair.'

'I protest.' One of the lieutenant-commanders said, the one Lennart had nicknamed Grumpy. 'That would disrupt our training cycle-'

'Your casualty rate is very low- a shaved percentage point above expected accident rates. If you need a full training carrier to replace the trickle of pilots you're losing, then there's something more deeply wrong than shortage of assets. Would you like me to investigate that for you? No? Good.  
'That leaves us a Sweep Line led by a Venator- and a strike line composed of ourselves and an Arrogant. For balance's sake- you do have a handful of Victory-III there, do you not? Let me see, their service records- the Perseverance, repeatedly reprimanded for being off station, low personnel turnover- we'll take her.'

Stunned, blank looks on the faces of some of them, two opened their mouths, thought about what their line of argument was supposed to be, and gave up.

'As for the rest- two Meridian, I think, to lead the probe lines.'

'Repair estimate on Comarre is two point two million hours, Captain.' Mirannon stated. 'Eleven and a half days if we do it ourselves.'

Three of the staff officers' eyes bugged out at that. The standard reckoning was that a fleet tender could provide twelve thousand man-hours a day, a Deepdock eighty thousand per bay assigned. Mirannon was counting on most of the Engineering department and half of the Legion putting in twelve hour days.

'Yes, on balance.' Lennart decided. 'We're going to need working up time- probably much more than that, but for a beginning it'll do.  
'I'll expect you,' he addressed the staff officers, 'to provide parts and materials accordingly. Other ships I want assigned; Tarazed Meridian, Demolisher-class Tythallin, Guillemot- and there's a name to conjure with, what's the Obdurate doing in a backwater like this? Definitely.  
'Strike cruisers Havoc, Kuruma, Darxani, Blackwood-' He ran off a sequence of names as the staff officers looked more and more depressed. If their reactions were anything to go by, his judgement was right and he was creaming off the best.

'Well,' Lennart turned to his command team after the conference was over and the link had been dropped, 'we have an operational squadron. Now we need an operation to deploy it on.'

'We are working on the assumption that Adannan is up to something dangerous, sinister and dubious?' Rythanor asked.

'Technically, no. We are making that assumption, but we're not working on it. We need to gather evidence for that, in the meantime we play it straight- as, worryingly, he is. Don't even think loudly about manufacturing it.'

'Right. Now you put the box down, turn off the repulsor unit- work out for yourself which comes first- and take out the sensor wands.' Suluur advised.

'Never done this before, have you?' Gendrik said, managing not to break his toes when he shut the repulsor unit off.

'Now remember, look technical.' Aldrem said. They were in one of the transverse corridors near the base of the tower; staff space. Pure bureaucracy acting as an ablative layer around sensor-interpretation, comms and signals, computing, navigational plot and ecm/eccm control complexes. Hard against the outer skin of the ship, obviously- no-one but a complete fruitbat would design a ship with internal PD turrets, although there were rumours about some of the early Sienar designs- one team would make electronic noise simulating a point defence battery in place, the others would listen and see how it penetrated into the hull.

All of them thought, in their separate ways, this is crazy. Nobody actually said so, in so many words.

As the control team were listening, they saw a half-familiar figure coming down the corridor. Long black robe and gown, hood up with a hint of red hair protruding out, figure just hidden enough to get the imagination drooling.

Laurentia saw them standing there, looking like some avant-garde corps de ballet waving scanning rods in odd positions, balancing on tiptoe to reach deckheads, sweeping them following cable runs. A contact and some information. Why not?

She approached the man who seemed to be their leader, who was holding, for some strange reason, a light repeating blaster. His insignia called him a senior chief petty officer.

'Senior Chief, I wonder if you can help me? I'm on the staff of the Special Assistant-'

One of them said nothing but his eyebrows rolled back behind his head; one, a female, looked at her- enviously.

Laurentia gave her a small, mocking smile, and moved on. One of them was familiar- in the mass if not in the individual. Line Four, Mod Eleven Mark Nine, one of the later clone lines, one frame in a rapidly evolving sequence- limited production, supposed to be highly optimised, mounted recon/scout trooper. Only fractionally more of them than there were of her own breed, only a couple of million. He looked back at her calmly, utterly unruffled.

The leader was thinking hard; he had very sharp eyes, she noticed. Not very pleased to see her. 'How can we do that, Ma'am?' he said, evenly and officially.

'I need a computer terminal with level-5 access. Would you know where one of those is?'

All four of them looked at each other. They were trying to look honestly baffled, but only partially succeeding.

'I'm sorry, ma'am, we're not cleared that highly ourselves. Comms and Signals is eight decks down, two transverse corridors forward, Central Computing is three decks up and six forward.' Aldrem said, calm and helpful, but looking at her like he was seeing crosshairs.

'Oh.' She said, reluctant to go to any of the heavily staffed, highly monitored main facilities. They noticed. To change the subject she said 'If you don't mind me asking, why are you carrying a T-21?'

'Health and safety reasons, ma'am.' Aldrem replied, sizing up if he could get the weapon aimed and levelled before she could quick draw. Probably; but there was no good reason to bet his life on it yet. She looked unconvinced, as well she might.

'We're surveying for mounting points for additional point defence. The sighting system on this will give us a good idea of fields of fire, and how much baffling the gun mount's going to need.'

'Really?' she said, mildly interested. 'How does an infantry support weapon scale to a destroyer CIWS?'

The other three tried to think of ways of shutting him up, then groaned as they realised it was too late.

'In terms of physical scale, frighteningly well, but that's not the main determinant of bolt power, it's the material construction of the weapon. You can almost get away with locally smelted and hardened basesteel in these, but the more power the weapon develops the higher grade of durasteel and quadanium-reinforce it requires.  
'It's an indirect linkage, the material strength of the barrel projects and backs the containment field; but that's basically why starfighter lasers are so compact and put out so much energy, the weight of them would severely unbalance say an AT-AT, but the field drivers that redundantly swing the turret respond more precisely to a small, dense, sharply-defined mass, which-' her eyes started to glaze over, not that it would stop him.

He seemed to ramble on, getting as far as-'and feedback from the pressurised, or to be more correct ambiently laden, containment field, in composition LTM-291 durasteel gives a stress-strain curve roughly like this.'

Hooking the light repeating blaster up into one armpit - braced on his arm, finger by the trigger guard - and waving one of the sensor wands in the air with the other to describe the graph.

Two twitches, she thought, and that thing is shining right in my eyes and his gun is resting on my bellybutton - even clones have bellybuttons, and she would miss hers if it went away. Especially if it took the lower half of her body with it.

These people are obviously up to something. She decided to file that one for investigation and analysis. One drawback of Imperial uniformity; no nametags. Interchangeability, one rank-and-file was supposed to be very much like another.

Calling them on it would result in- at least one death, perhaps three. Hers, and up to two of theirs. This was one of those times to smile, walk away - and set up an ambush around the corner.

'Really, Senior Chief-' she flashed her eyes at him, hoping he would be that dumb; he refused to give his name. 'I do have a job to do, and I won't keep you from yours. Good day.' She swept off- wishing she could stop to listen, but there wasn't time.

'You were looking at her hips.' Jhareylia nagged Aldrem.

'I was looking at her holsters. A disintegrator pistol- short ranged and extremely powerful, and a blaster autopistol. Nasty combination. I wonder why they don't make disintegrator cannon?' Aldrem tried to deflect the oncoming explosion.

'Because the barrel life would be so short, you'd barely be aiming on before they burnt out.' Fendon said. 'Who was she?'

'Trouble. You do realise we are more thoroughly blown than an Oseon tumbleweed?' Jhareylia ranted.

'There are many, many much less delicate similes you could have used there.' Suluur said, irrelevantly.

'Blown like one of the many things you wanted her to do to you?' she snapped, then regretted it. 'I knew this was going to be awkward, but this is verging on the ridiculous. First you show your ID for Force's sake, then you have a long technical diatribe with someone who works closely with the people we are supposed to be kidnapping. How much less covert can this get?'

'Normally for me, subtle involves stepping down to megaton range blasts. What did you expect from a bunch of gunners?' Aldrem snarled back, disappointed by her jealousy. 'Maybe we can manage to hide in plain sight - be so spectacularly obvious, no-one would believe it was us.'

'When's your commission due?' Suluur asked, joking. 'You're far too crazy to be a PO.'

'Chief?' Gendrik's voice over com unit. 'Targets.'

'Good. I think. Problems?'

'Yes - they're carrying one of the damage control crew, who seems to have got in the way of a lightsabre.'

'Kriff. This just gets better. Herd them in this direction-' he glanced at the bulkhead, reeled off the reference number. 'Then follow on behind them. I think we can still make this work.'

The two twi'lek were hopelessly lost by the time they 'came across' a party of crewmen apparently trying to find insects stuck between the layers of plating.

'We're getting interference from somewhere, mobile, slow, could be external, do the rebels have spacetroopers?' Aldrem improv'd.

'I've heard of space bikers, but I don't think even they're that stupid.' Gendrik said, from around the corner.  
The twi'lek stopped, lost and confused. Aldrem - still holding the light repeater - shuffled up to the male, ran his scanner up the length of him, up to the collar. Helpfully, the scanner beeped.

'You're radiating.' Aldrem told the bemused twi'lek. Looking closely in his eyes. Slightly glassy. No expert on altered states of mind - only a gifted amateur - he tried to gauge the slave's state of down-troddenness. If that was even a word.

'We can't have that. We'll have to escort you out of the area.' Aldrem tried not to smile at how easy it was, and the reaction he got from them helped.

The two of them looked- abused, that was the word. Which was worrying. If Adannan had them genuinely and thoroughly broken, that meant they might not know much, and the idea of their escaping of their own accord wouldn't hold water.

'Right, follow us, we'll take you down to the med bay.' Aldrem tried to sound authoritative. It was a pale imitation of the snap of command in Adannan's voice, but it seemed to work.

They followed Aldrem, Suluur, Jhareylia and Fendon, with the other twelve bringing up the rear and hemming them in.

'Pel, I'm sorry I shouted at you.' Jhareylia said.

'Oh, don't apologise now, you're probably going to do it all over again in five minutes. I have no idea,' he muttered trying to avoid their overhearing him, 'how we're going to get down from the bridge tower without walking right past another patrol section.'

'Is there no back alley route? No maintenance accessway?'

'Without alerting them that something's not right? No.' Aldrem replied.

'Then alert them and take the risk.' Jhareylia decided.

'That leaves us carrying two crates full of noisy captive and a junior officer in shock down the inside of a turbolift. Amateur acrobatics? I'd pay a lot to see that. I'd pay even more to be allowed not to do it.' Aldrem stated.

'What about the garbage chute?' Jhareylia suggested.

'On this ship, with Mirannon in charge? Whenever we get something blown off, he melts it down and slabs it on again as armour - or engine bell reinforcements so we can run hot enough to still move.  
'He even tries to recycle waste heat with thermocouples, and you just do not want to know about some of the things that they do in life support. The chute was sealed up years ago.'

'So short of having someone walk up to them, point and say 'oh, look, a distraction', and hope they fall for it, no chance.' Gendrik com'd.

'Actually, maybe, I think we could make that work.' Suluur said. 'An EM distraction.'

'Simulate a, what, a problem they have to deal with directly instead of yelling for a damage control crew? That would have to be an internal security problem. Ideas?'

'Yes, actually. I think this might work…'

The squad on duty at the turbolift cluster, CJ54, were moderately alert; there was always the chance of some stray last-ditch madness by Rebel boarders that they would have to deal with, either directly in their area or somewhere nearby that another unit would respond to, and they would have to shift to cover their area.

Platoon CJ5 were artillerymen; the tactical team was formed from the crews of a Bryn & Gweith Leveller-1 and its ammo wagon. They would be well trained and exercised in infantry work, but seldom have had to do it for real.

On the other hand, they knew their explosions, so this had to be convincing.

There was a reflected electromagnetic scream of forcefields colliding as the matter they were anchored to was torn apart; breaching charge, CJ54 decided, several corridors away, the flash ducted by the blast doors.

Rebel boarders. The last ditch madness they had been half expecting. First response; the team moved out, half directly for the point, half flank and reserve.

It was not a confirmed alert - there was little activity after the flare - but they sent out a precautionary warning.

Soon, Aldrem knew, that would be examined by main sensor control, they would realise there had been no external event to cause it, and an internal search would begin. All nineteen of them moved for the lift shaft.

Gendrik and Hruthhal were bringing up the rear. They noticed the twi'lek's antennae twitch; regulations prohibited any form of secret communication between crewmembers, officially. Not being xenologists, that was the only reason they knew about twitch-talk, because it was mentioned in the regs.

The two large parts/cargo lifts could each hold all of them; they piled into one and headed down to the level of the medical bay.

The two twi'lek both looked at Aldrem; Suluur turned round, realised they looked stiff-limbed, glassy, twitching slightly- he bet that whatever anti-theft conditioning they had was about to kick in.

'Kriff! Pel-'

The two twi'lek both dropped into martial arts stances, lights on their slave collars glowing, eyes hypnosis-blank; the female lashed out with clawed fingers to try to rip Jhareylia's throat open, the male dived for Aldrem.

Senior Chief and Master Gunner Pel Aldrem had half a second to use, and he put his trust in his trigger finger.

He fired a two shot burst, tracking upwards, at the female; the first shot hit on the side of her neck - whether blowing the collar off caused a greater mental or physical shock, immaterial, either would have been enough to put her down. The second shot blew off one of her lekku, as she crumpled to the ground.

The male never made it, as Suluur intercepted him, crashing into him in mid air, as both of them hit the ground Suluur spiked an elbow into the base of the twi'lek's spinal cord. He thrashed, twitched, tried to get up and Hruthhal hit him over the head with the severed lekku. Repeatedly.

'Well,' Aldrem said, after it was done, 'I wouldn't exactly call this a bloodless action.' Most of them were splattered. Cauterisation, yes, but the male had been hit hard enough that most of the clots in the head-tentacle had burst. 'Are you all right, Lieutenant?'

The young officer would have looked utterly gobsmacked, if his jaw hadn't already fallen off. Clearly not. Tarshkavik was busy defusing and removing the male twi'lek's collar; Suluur was checking to see the female was still breathing.

'Areath? Can you judge these things-' Aldrem said quietly, waving with the gun muzzle, safety now back on and his finger of the trigger, at the sensor units- 'precisely enough to wipe out the lieutenant's short term memory with an EM surge?'

'No. Not reliably. Don't covert operations usually involve a bit less mess than this?' he asked Jhareylia.

'A successful operation is one that the other side don't realise ever happened, usually.' Jhareylia admitted. 'Nearly there.'

Aldrem reached out and selected a new level - below the medical centre, down in the body of the ship. Near the armoury, but not in it. He did not want to lock two unbalanced, brainwashed-aggressive beings in a room full of heavy warheads.

'We go there, we all get out, we set the lift to stop at the medical complex on the way back up. Listen, Lieutenant; this didn't happen, we weren't here. If you really want to know, talk to your department commander.'

Laurentia found her way to a facility that should have a high level tie in to the main computer; Damage Control Dorsal-140.

This ship was confusing her badly; she knew her way around the base template of Star Destroyer, but this ship had been modified - or more accurately rebuilt after refit. The first thing she used her access for was to call up a map.

The second was to look through the ship's transmission logs for the message that had alerted Adannan in the first place, and backtrack from that to find out who sent it. Agents could be anyone, anywhere- ah. Stormtrooper Corps. Hardly usual, but still.

So, the flight bay. Again severely modified; what had happened to the goal of uniformity? She quietly mocked it whenever she had the chance, but now she was face to face with the lack of it and suddenly realising how much it mattered to her after all. So many, many idiosyncrasies.

She found a corner to wait quietly in- no-one asked her for ID, they recognised her from their arrival, that and the word of what they had done to the tank sargeant had got round.

It was absurd, but she almost felt resentment from them. That wasn't right at all. They were disposable, they weren't supposed to have feelings.

The dropship she was waiting for returned- yet again an abnormality; why don't these people just admit they have secret rebel sympathies and have done with it?

A slightly curved dish shape, no superstructure at all. Carried to war in a bowl. It had been a long time since she had ridden in a drop assault, and looking at the 'lilypad' she had absolutely no desire to do so again.

It landed, the edges drooped, the troopers on board dismounted - a company, herding about that many again of rebel prisoners.

One squad in - oh, this was infuriating. They might as well have been holding signs saying 'hello, we are a special purpose unit'. Iridescent blue-red armour, vaguely reminiscent of the Sovereign Protectors. How could anyone do covert observation and draw that much attention to themselves? Caution, she warned herself, you're getting snarky. Just because they're strange, don't underestimate them.

They were looking at her. Ten of them - she didn't know how many there were supposed to be. Two wounded, in fact. They marched in her direction; she waited for them. As they got within comfortable speaking distance on the noisy deck she asked 'Which of you is Watcher 22173?'

One of them took off- disbelieving glance at the breastplate, her? helmet, Ren suddenly felt dizzy, already knowing what she was going to see, one of her own sisters looking back at her. Aleph-3 knew the statistics, in a general way. She and her sisters had been supposed initially to be issued at mobile - divisional level - at the time, that had been a million or so.

Then the estimates had skyrocketed, to account for the units being pulled from planetary defence forces and incorporated into the Grand Armies - then contracted drastically again, as the dawn of the Empire had put an end to any requirement the Stormtrooper Corps might have had to explain to anyone what they were doing.

Only the initial batch had been completed to maturity; most of those planned in the brief surge had been flushed. Fishfood for the ocean lifeforms of Kamino. There had been vengeance for that, eventually.

Some of the remainder had died, some had shown personality instabilities and been discharged, some had found their way into other roles. This was obviously one of them.

Both of them looked at each other, expecting to feel the instant understanding of the identical twin, divine instantly and easily what was on the other's mind; both of them were horrified when it didn't happen.

'We need to talk.' Laurentia said, decisively.

They found a chamber off the flight bays, a parts storeroom full of racks of disassembled TIE wings. All ten of them came in with her.

'They all know.' Aleph-3 said. 'You're on Lord Adannan's staff?'

'His media analyst.' Ren replied. Reading between the lines to work out the truth behind the reports. 'You're the hunter that spotted untapped potential in a man who has been in Imperial service for twenty years. What did you see that no-one else did?'

For a long horrible moment, Aleph-3 weighed the situation and realised she absolutely did not want to tell her sister the truth. She barely wanted to admit to herself what it was.

'We re-interpreted the data to produce an alternative explanation. The more we tested that alternative against the facts, the better an explanation it seemed.'

Aleph-3 began, actually hoping she had drifted far enough away from her sister that she couldn't read her. 'Captain Lennart has a reputation as a fighting fool. A frothing madman, capable of victory against appalling odds, but unsuitable for any higher responsibility. The longer we spent on board, the more of a chance we got to look at those victories, and realised that most of them were won with a dexterity and finesse that simply did not square up with his reputation.  
'Now, false reports of success from officers covering their vulnerabilities are far from unknown; there are entire divisions of the Ubiqtorate tasked with catching out officers and officials who lie like that. So we were sceptical, but as we got to know him better, we realised that the situation was in favour of the reputation being the falsehood. How do you feel about your Lord Alric?'

'I…' Laurentia began, mental gears clashing. 'I don't. It's irrelevant.'

'So it doesn't matter to you whether he succeeds or fails, rises or falls? Really?' Aleph-3 said, unbelieving.

'Of course it matters to me. He's my assigned task.'

'With all due respect, dear sister- bollocks.' Aleph-3 said, bluntly. 'It's a common flaw in our line; overidentification with the principal. A convenience to the cloners, a sublimation of something that might otherwise cause problems.'

'Captain Lennart is your principal; you want him to succeed. So you made him out to be a Force user?' Laurentia said, cattishly.

'You think I'm indulging in inclarity and wish-fulfillment? Just because it would be good if it was true doesn't mean that it's automatically false. Look at the way he holds this ship together without most of the standard tools of Imperial discipline.'

'Fools and lunatics for the most part-' Laurentia began, then realised it was exactly what her odd sister, whom she could not read, meant. 'What have you been doing for the last twenty years?'

'Does time make strangers of us all, or does it just make us increasingly strange?' Aleph-3 quipped. 'Legion planning and intel, until the HQ group got bounced by several million droids and I found out I was rather good with a DC-15. Platoon sharpshooter, sniper scout, forward observer and then special operations from there.' On her own at the hairy end of the business, in other words. 'Yourself?'

'I was detached on consultancy duties early on, then rose through the system in human resources. A headhunter-' Laurentia looked at her sister's E-11- 'although not in the same literal way.'

'So you tell Kor Alric what he should be looking for? Look at the pattern. Tell me Jorian Lennart hasn't been avoiding promotion for the last eight years at least. Tell me he can hold this ship together, work the system, and fight his battles the way he does, without the Force - or some powerful influence - being on his side.' Aleph-3 tried not to sound passionate, and failed.

'You are making him sound increasingly unsuitable.' Laurentia said. 'If he has a power he does not want to use, is capable of authority he does not want to have - why is he a candidate for the Dark Side?'

'Good question.' Aleph-3 added. 'He served through the Clone Wars; became familiar with the detached perspective of the Jedi.'  
'He fears the limitations of the Force.' Aleph-3 continued, sign-language thanking her commander for the assist. 'He has no desire to enter the mental boxes the Jedi trapped themselves in. Unless you are much luckier than I, you do not have the first hand experience that could convince him otherwise.'

That was pure fishing, and Laurentia took a second to realise it- her first reaction was one of relief that her sister was not significantly more gifted than she was. Then she realised that was what Aleph-3 had been trying to find out.

'No, I don't. Do you?'

If there was a question in Aleph-3's head that wish fulfilment was the answer to, that was it. She had been telling the truth to Jorian Lennart; she had a tenuous, fingertip connection to the Force. Too little to do anything except worry herself sick with.

'No, but your principal does.' She said, picking her words. 'If your man can convince-' fractional pause there while she avoided saying 'mine'- 'Captain Lennart that he doesn't have to gain the Force at the cost of his wits, then it can work.'

'Why do you want that, personally? You're not even supposed to have personal wants.' Laurentia said.

'Supposed by whom, Sister? You were born to the Legion too.' Aleph-3 said.

'I outgrew that.' Laurentia said, and knew she was lying. Aleph-3 didn't need to say so. If her defence was crumbling, it was time to return to the attack. 'Are you involved with him? Emotionally attached?'

Aleph-3 kept her face straight, but only just. Yes, although space knows why, was the truthful answer. He with me? No. Young loves and brief affairs since, Lady Lyria, may she find a convenient sarlacc to rot in, amongst others- but his first and truest tie is to the ship. The only chance, she knew, was to find or create some circumstance where he actually needed her, had to depend on her for some purpose. Such as being his guide and support as he came to terms with the Force.

Some part of her felt like a filthy pervert for even daring to think of such things, contrary to her duty and the traditions of the Corps. Another part, the part she used for pretending to be a normal person, had been counting days and years, and chances taken, and feeling a life sliding away. Which was on the face of it ridiculous, heretical, absurd.

Then again, she remembered being told in training that the main driver of true sentience was the ability to deceive. Lifeform versus environment was only the beginning; true pressure to develop was when there was competition between members of the same dominant species. The human race, and all the other races, only truly learned to think when they began to need to out-think one another. She and her sisters had been bred as the deceitful arm of the Corps, supposed to lie to gain advantage for their hopelessly straightforward brothers in white. Perhaps it was inevitable that she should become a little strange?

Inevitable and forgivable? No, or perhaps only if it works.

Her sister realised it. How could she not?

'I will report to my lord that this may be a wild mynock chase. That your judgement is compromised.' Laurentia said- not because she believed it was, what she had seen and heard so far indicated he was a good prospect if wild and contrary; but mainly to score points off Aleph-3.

Perhaps, if he was that interesting, Laurentia would see what she could do with him herself.


	23. Chapter 23

'Squadron Leader, would you like a moment alone?' Yatrock asked him. Franjia was, if it was possible under the oxygen mask, blushing. Aron was trying to think of a comeback when there was the sound of feet landing on the deck behind him as most of the squadron jumped to attention. Group Captain Olleyri.

'At ease.' The fighter group commander more-or-less ordered. He surveyed the situation and decided to proceed as if on the automatic assumption that everything was going to be alright. Cheerfully breeze by the difficulties.

'I've got more than half a mind to hang up my hamster hat, now. Doubt I'll ever be able to top that.'

'All you need is shoddy enough opposition, Sir.' Aron said, joking.

'And changes to the accounting procedure- d'you know, back in the Clone Wars-'

'You did your first tour on Aethersprites…didn't you Sir?' Franjia said from the bed. She thought she was poking fun; in fact, it was true.

'Actually, I did, but it was just as they were going out. Anyway, used to be that if yours was the killing shot on a carrier, you got credited with the fighters that went down with it.  
'Not any more, kriff the bureaucrats. I'm going to need at least two, could be four new squadron commanders. So are we going to have to wire all that junk into the cockpit with you?' he said to Franjia.

'What- me? Now?' she asked, wanting it but not quite daring to believe.

'Yes, you. Gamma One's mostly in a bed over there-' he waved an arm in the general direction, far too many partitions in the way to see- 'with bits of him in half a dozen buckets. They mentioned something about epoxying him back together. Recovery time in years.  
'Kappa's CO, Murqilzen, got zorched outright. If I go desk-piloting, Alpha needs a new leader. Jandras, you're ex-Interceptors; you can get Gamma. The Hunter's pretty close to fighter performance, and that was the plan anyway. Rahandravell, as soon as they unplug you, you move up to Epsilon One.'

'Sir, I-' Franjia began.

'Group Captain, I didn't think I was going to say this, but I've got attached to the Starwings. Can I-'

'Hunter's only a hair slower than the TIE/ln. You'd never be able to keep up in a Starwing, you'd be six-fifty 'g' short. What I really want to do is find something to replace the Bombers with, but it'll never happen.' Olleyri said.

Despite repeated attempts, nobody had managed to come up with a bomber that carried more payload, with greater accuracy, for less expense of credits and maintenance time than the TIE/sa. The Starwing could do the same job and fight it's way through a defensive screen besides, but the time, space and money they took to look after was more than the cost of replacement TIE bombers.

'Have you seen this, Sir?' Aron handed him the article, a handful of crumply sheets of hardcopy.

'When do you think they would make a press release like this?' Olleyri said, not bothering to take it.

'Way in advance, to raise money?' Yatrock suggested. He was about to move up to being the senior flight commander; he was happy.

'They'll be looking for a ta-daah! moment- raise interest…just before they offer them as an option.' Franjia suggested.

'How long were you awake?' Aron asked her.

'While…couldn't get my throat to work.' She said.

'We've known about this for ages- had feelers out for months, trying to make sure some of the service test items came our way. Then we got a first look at some of the spec sheets and tried even harder to get out of it. There may be a few interesting bits, but we have enough problems, right now especially. We-'

There was a sound of boots hitting decks, again. 'At ease.' Captain Lennart; he found their bay.

'Ah, Antar. First, your flying career's over. You're a dangerous maniac.  
'Second, I find myself compelled to let you set a bad example for the rest of the force. We're being reinforced up to Objective Pursuit Squadron, which means I need an air commodore.'

'So- first ground me, then promote me? Does that make sense?' Olleyri asked.

'No. On paper, you're being promoted to a non-flying position- but face it, that was a kriffing bad example to set. There's a reason you usually fly in formation. Speaking of which; we should have between the ships of the group a hundred and two squadrons. Mostly /ln, but a high proportion of others. Get as much practise as you can in as a controller.' Lennart said.

Olleyri looked closely at his commanding officer- who he now technically outranked, as far as he knew. Lennart hadn't put his new set of squares up yet. Normally almost treasonously casual, he was being unusually snappy, and trying not to fidget. 'Skipper, are you OK? You're jumpy as a regallian sand flea.'

'Very possibly not.' Lennart said. 'You might as well get it done while you're here. Everyone on board is going to be put through a midichlorian count. I am not looking forward to the results.'

'Midichlorians? For…Force sensitivity?' Franjia asked.

'Yes, you don't know. We have a senior official with us, an adept of the Force. He's recruiting- and with special reference to you, actually, Antar, you might want to abandon any plans you have for Rahandravell for the time being.'

Olleyri took a deep breath, gave up on two lines of argument, and said 'The reason, sir?'

'The dark adept's personal pilot was a female cyborg. Senses and reflexes heavily enhanced. He decided she had let him down - by failing to sneak up on two starfleet destroyers - and took away her antirejection meds.' He knew this because of the first results from the sensors.

All those present grimaced. That would be a particularly nasty way to go. Then Franjia realised what he was getting at and went white.

'No, he's not going to pick you as a replacement, not if I can help it.' Lennart said, bitterly.

'You were happy to send us undercover to spy…on the rebels.' She said.

'That is going to require some nifty retroactive filing to avoid having attention drawn your way, too. I knew there was a reason we kept the ship's offices around, instead of converting them to something meaningful like a bantha farm. We're outrunning our own planning here; making clumsy, instinctive responses, not looking far enough ahead at all, not at all.  
'I'll do what I can. And yes, as far as I'm concerned, Adannan probably does count as the greater threat. At least the rebels would only have had you shot.' He nodded to them, they saluted, he left.

'Don't worry.' Aron said to Franjia. 'I'll break the rest of your bones if it comes to that.' It didn't come out right, but she knew what he meant- that he would fake, or make, the evidence as necessary to preserve her from that.

'What have we come to,' she said, 'when that starts to sound like…a good idea?'

Lennart's next port of call was something he had been putting off for far too long. His executive officer. As he headed for the lifts, one of the big cargo turbolifts slid open, and in it was one man, uniformed, huddled on the floor. One of his junior engineers.

'You, Surgeon-lieutenant.' Lennart pointed at the medic he meant, then at the injured man. 'See to him.' Coldly holding his temper in.  
What you know in the head but have to live in the heart before it sinks in, he thought. How easy it is for Adannan, in his turn, to provoke me by striking out at members of my crew.

What was it I told Dordd, when he was made up to Captain? You need your crew to think for you? Never truer than now- and I hope they have. I hope they can come up with something.  
There was no place for the exec to be except in his cabin; he was not under arrest or anything like it, but he had a task to complete before he got his job back, so he would be there, doing that.

For a moment Lennart wondered what would happen if he wasn't, if Mirhak-Ghulej had cracked under the strain, gone walkabout, and he was forced to launch a ship-wide search for his own exec; that would not look good. Sod's Law made him actually expect it for a moment, but no. It was the bronze-faced man, in a bathrobe, who opened the door.

'Captain.'

'Exec.' Lennart walked in; the room was full of droids sitting at computer terminals. Ah. Plan C, then.

'So. Have you learned anything about the men and women theoretically under your authority?' Lennart asked him, pointing at the terminals, looking at one of the screens. 'Did you give them a set of instructions to follow? How often do you check their work?'

'Sir, they are running to a set of algorithms derived from Imperial Fleet Manuals 18-A through C, 22-D revision 5, 34Q, 56, and 71 through 77.' Mirkak-Ghulej said, coldly.

Have I dented that mask at all? Lennart wondered. Made any real impression on him? The publications he was citing did not make a happy list - Dress, Discipline and Deportment, Permitted and Forbidden Relationships, the Manual of Conduct, Dealing with Civilians, and the long unhappy series of Crimes, Defaults and Transgressions. Those last especially made grim reading, so much so that Lennart often had them used as a punishment in themselves- minor offenders were forced to read them, full of pain and misery and deadly threat ready to be handed out for anything except walking the straight and narrow path of official good behaviour.

Generally, once they curled up into a ball and started whimpering, they were allowed to stop. Some of the time.

'So let me see a representative sample of your conclusions.' Lennart said. Dordd handed him a datapad. It was the master index; long list of names, colour-highlighted in yellow, orange, red.

Lennart checked to see what they meant; caution, formal reprimand, disciplinary action. There were few unhighlighted, no action, and even fewer green, commendation. 'Tell me this is a jest. Please tell me that you have not been this imperceptive and unresponsive.'

Mirhak-Ghulej paused, thinking about it, while Lennart fiddled with the menu options, hoping to bring up the one that said 'ha ha, fooled you' and revealed the genuine set of reports. It didn't seem to be there.

'Captain, like any good Imperial officer, I did what was asked of me.'

'Did you?' Lennart said, coldly. 'The first- no, second- instruction is a very simple general rule; succeed. What effect do you think the demotion, degradation, imprisonment and execution of so many would have on the effectiveness of the ship?'

'Negative in the short term, of course, but in the long term-'

'In the long term, this ship would be finished as a fighting unit. If-' the lightbulb went on in his head. 'Very cleverly done. Do you really think it wise to go quite so far in making an enemy of your commanding officer?'

Protesting that he didn't understand would be futile. Mirhak-Ghulej knew exactly what Lennart meant. The captain continued 'You know, the worst punishment for your trying to end-run me like this might be to let you do it. Of course you know about the special assistant to the privy council; what part of that do you imagine means he plays by the rules?'

'He is a senior official of the Empire. How could he not? Order is Empire, Empire is Order.'

'Do you know, you're actually beginning to scare me? I do my best to make the Empire sound like a good idea to the people we come across - as per manual 56 - but your total absorption of the party line, it's as if you had it…tattooed on your hindbrain…where's your file?'

Lennart pushed one of the robots out of the way, sat down at the terminal, called up his executive officer's personnel file. Cracked open the parts only he was technically allowed to see, including the medical files. No, apparently.

'I'm not sure whether I'm more worried by the fact that you appear not to have had radical neurosurgery inflicted on you, or that you behave in a way that made me expect that you had.' Lennart said;

Mirhak-Ghulej made no reply. The captain was skimming the background section of the exec's file. Ah. That sort of made sense.

'I think I understand now. You come from a very hostile, low-population planet, yes? Constant care required. Your skin was a deliberate - and insufficient - attempt to adapt.  
'Your people lived on a knife edge, weather conditions not far short of a permanent extinction event, superheated winds, defences requiring constant vigilance. Somehow you found yourselves on the side of the Confederation.'

Mirhak-Ghulej sat down on one of the desks. Lennart carried on, watching his exec carefully. 'Like most such colonies, the need for absolute diligence, absolute discipline, is hammered in from the moment you're born. Then the war, and the assault, and the catastrophes- the breaching of the domes, and the terrible slow deaths, your adaptations just long enough to prolong the agony. In the name of galactic Order. How could that be?'

'It was a mistake! A misunderstanding! If you follow the rules, everything will be all right!' The mask cracked.

'No, you won't- there's an entire galaxy to prove you wrong. The Republic followed the rules, after all.' Lennart pointed out.

'And it died and was replaced by the Empire. You see? Order is all.'

'Order saved you, brought you to maturity, then violated everything you ever knew, and opened up a whole new galaxy of possibilities at the same time- small wonder that you cleave to it as though the concept was the only thing in your world. I'm not surprised that you hold to it when reason, sense and circumstance dictate otherwise.  
'This ship doesn't work that way. We are supposed to be supremely orderly so we can function as a bulwark against chaos. Large parts of the Imperial Starfleet are; I find it far more effective to simply dive in.

'You forget, I was there when the Empire was born. Many of us were, and saw the codes and regulations being drawn up.  
Those manuals have a hundred battles and a generation of tradition behind them now; not much, but more than the Republic had in the random scuffles before the Clone Wars.  
'As the Naval Orders and Instructions appeared, they were dissected in every wardroom in the Fleet. The whys and wherefores taken apart with an untensioning plane.

'Reason trumps mere order, and the reason behind the severity of all this lot-' gesturing at the computers- 'is because the natural-born crews of the old republic were a shambling mess, and the clones were organised and efficient.  
'Imperial military discipline is basically an attempt to force the rank and file into the mould set by Line One, Mod One. The politicised high command thought it was essential. I don't. Never have. Ordinary men and women can rise to the challenge. It takes brutality and iron will to beat them into shape, to null their minds until they can be as immobile in rest, responsive to your will rather than their own at need, as the many Fetts. But-'

'Exactly!' the exec interrupted. 'An iron will, utter total dedication, beyond self. Overcoming the merely human to become the fist of the Empire.'

'Personally, I've always wondered which lucky sod got the job of Imperial tickle stick…'Lennart replied. 'I come from what even I have to admit was a permanent rolling cockup of a fleet, we were overjoyed to have competent clone crews to work with, and beating the new men into the same pattern- for some individuals, that actually is what you have to do.

'Given the manoeuvring room, I far prefer to begin with and build on what shreds of willingness to serve they arrive with. I've been extraordinarily lucky in spending such a long time in command of the same ship, and having a chance to mould them to my own standards. You're the sixth being to serve as my exec during that time.'

'What happened to the other five?' Mirhak-Ghulej asked.

'One moved on to command his own destroyer, one to command system defence network Owainne. One died in action. One to a training command, one transferred to sector group staff and planning. I haven't transferred anyone to the psych ward. Yet.'

'Captain, are you implying that you consider me mentally unstable?' Mirhak-ghulej stood up.

Lennart took a deep breath. He was going to have to do this the hard way. 'No. Exactly the opposite, in fact; you're too stable. Why are these people different from you? Why is their view of their duty so very unlike yours?'

'I don't know.' Mirhak-Ghulej said, then rallied. 'In any case, it's their problem, not mine. I am senior, they have to conform to me. Order, conformity. Correct Thought. Pillars of the Empire.'

'There is a major flaw in your case.' Lennart pointed out. 'You're my exec. You have to conform to me.'

'Not when you are out of step with the greater good. The empire is greater than any individual within it.' He took a short, jerky step towards Lennart.

'Don't touch me. First, I would have to beat you unconscious with your own liver, then I would have to have you committed to psychiatric care- where you would be asked the same questions over and over, every day, until you really did go mad…It wouldn't solve your problems but it might solve mine.'

Neither of them had recent close combat experience, but Lennart was prepared to bet that he could fight a lot dirtier than Mirhak-Ghulej.

'This is an order, Lieutenant-Commander. Wipe all this.' Sudden flare of anger in the exec's eyes, especially as he had been referred to by permanent rather than acting rank.

'Pick one hundred crewmen at random. Select one incident in the career of each of them, and write it up in full detail- including what they thought they were doing at the time.'

Lennart's comlink beeped. Brenn.

'Captain, hyper-trace incoming. Mass shadow, probable light destroyer, awaiting ID.'

'On my way.' Lennart left the exec to his new task, and headed for the bridge. Thinking, in the turbolift; this is bizarre. This is microcosm. I'm having the same problems with my own immediate junior as Adannan is with me. Both of us with fundamentally different interpretations of what it means to serve the Empire. I have to fight my viewpoint as if it was the only possible answer, and hope that the truth shakes itself out somewhere further down the line.

I almost hope this is a rebel; it'll be a relief to get back to simple, uncomplicated ship to ship combat.

In the lift on the way to the bridge, Lennart was beeped again.

'Skipper, we have a positive ID- it's the Perseverance.'

An option came to mind, and he couldn't resist. 'Plot me a Maximillian's Doughnut, Mr Brenn.'

'Sir, are you sure that's a good idea?' Brenn replied, but Lennart could hear him grin.

Rear-Admiral Maximillian Tentrada had invented the manoeuvre as an act of desperation during the Clone Wars; it amounted to playing leapfrog in hyperspace. As an incoming ship was detected, the plan was to plot a circular course in hyperspace, a low-energy ride to nowhere; and set it so that it touched very close to the inbound's predicted emergence point. As in single digit kilometres separation.

Low energy translated into high speed, on the far side of c. The nav team had to be very skilled to plot it that fast, supremely skilled to call it that close- or else every god who ever was had to decide to smile on them all at once.

Tentrada had been cornered, in command of an ad hoc group of damaged ships being sent back from the outer rim sieges to Gyndine for repair; several of them were under tow or on emergency backup drive, they had dropped into real space for running repairs and two pursuing Lucrehulks had made an attack run. The flagship, RSS Yalchuriem, was the only destroyer in full fighting order, and he came up with the plan to buy the rest of his charges time to flee. According to the stories, he had his bay doors open and the fighter wing hovering within ready to add their guns as well when they came out of hyperspace.

It worked. Torpedoes, capital and fighter, cranked out as fast as the targeters would cycle them, main guns fired until they glowed white-hot, into the stern of the lead Lucrehulk from seven kilometres initial range.

The strike leader was left drifting away, crippled and burning, most of her drive and power generation blown out, when the second turned on Tentrada.

Then-Senior Lieutenant and Navigation officer Jorian Lennart had been on one of the ships detached from Task Force Zalith- in transit to the outer rim- to reinforce the convoy. They had arrived to find a nearly burnt out Federation battleship, the mangled remains of a Venator, and a second Lucrehulk leaking air trying to chase down a scattered, fleeing force. The four-ship destroyer division managed to nail the Lucrehulk and recover enough survivors from the Yalchuriem to work out how it had been done.

Since then, Lennart had managed it only twice. Well, four times including the missed descent and the hyperdrive casualty. Even odds, and he was in the mood to push it a little. He arrived on the bridge just in time to hear Brenn say 'Execute.' and the viewscreens go to blue-white blur.

'Under the circumstances, Commander, I think we might want to alter that to a less loaded term. Initiate, no, that would be even worse; Activate? Hmm. Never mind, we've done it now. Give me the sensor picture of the Perseverance.'

Largely computer-inferred, of course; the Perseverance was a Victory-III, a KDY redesign of the Rendili light destroyer. Most of them had been built by Rendili, and they had served as escort/counterparts for the Venator class usually, the first and only version of the 900m destroyer family that had speed worthy of the name.

They had been internally gutted to achieve that, kept at least the bow missile batteries that the Vic-II gave away and added more and heavier guns- similar main battery to the Venator, in fact. That did stretch the capacity of their hulls; they were a maintenance nightmare, their habitability poor and their endurance limited by mechanical breakdown.

In combat, they were valuable enough to be worth putting up with, but in time of relative peace most sector fleets kept them as reserve. Perseverance's energy state was shaping up for a drop point half a million kilometres off Ghorn II; cautious, but not cautious enough.

They could make a rough guess at her velocity from her energy state, and a more accurate one from the operations manual.

Dordd's Arrogant-class had been left minding the battlefield; Perseverance would turn towards her. Lennart was counting on it.

Down in the pit, the link-man to Engineering was frantically trying to attract his attention; Lennart was ignoring him. It would be Mirannon objecting, he could already tell that much. Then again- 'Is that Commander Mirannon calling to ask me what the kriff I think I'm doing, or is it something else?' Just in case.

'Ah, yes sir, it is the Commander.'

'Tell him we're showing off; he'll understand.'

The Perseverance dropped out of hyperspace; ran an active scan.

'Captain? One contact and…three, no five, no, yes five destroyed ships. Wait, one of them's a station, no Rebels, the contact in one piece authenticates as Imperial, and- Kriff what's that?'

On Black Prince's bridge, they faded through after transition- emerged low and slightly to port, ninety kilometres off. Point blank. Near perfect. 'Guns, we are tango'ing a friendly vessel. Weapons safe; OMFCS- bridge target, converged sequential volley, shoot.'

Perseverance's EW systems screamed as targeting sensor pulses lashed into her; sixty HTL guide beams in rapid sequence, tenth of a second between each, all on the same spot low between the engine bells. More than enough to overload her shielding and rupture the reactor, if they had been real.

'What happened?' Perseverance's captain screamed at his executive officer.

'I don't know, why aren't we dead?' the exec yelled at the sensors and signals officer in turn.

'Battle stations, maximum thrust, signal for assistance, focus shields aft-' the captain gabbled; all right and appropriate things to do, but said in such a high pitched voice the bridge crew grasped one word in three. They got the part about engines; cold- starting and running immediately up to maximum output produced a characteristic flare- the unknown behind them sidestepped their ion wake as they raced away like a scalded pittin.

'Perseverance,' an authoritative and highly amused voice came over their bridge speakers, 'This is Black Prince Actual. Consider that your official welcome to Objective Pursuit Squadron 851- Yod. Stand down.'

She kept moving for several seconds, before reducing engine output to one third and pitching to reverse course. The neat, compact destroyer ended facing and drifting backwards from the older Imperator, slowly cancelling her velocity.

'Black Prince Actual, this is Perseverance Actual, Commander Stannis Lycarin.' The light destroyer's captain said, voice slightly calmer now- but still above normal. 'What did you just do to us?'

A manoeuvre that was never officially forbidden because fleet command felt that anyone daft enough to attempt it, with all its attendant hazards, would be better removed from the gene pool. That would be the truth. Lennart decided not to mention it.

'A subspecies of combat microjump. If we ever have to do it under active conditions, you will be taking your navigational data from us. Concerning data; prepare to receive a set of briefing documents, department command level and above eyes only- and transmit your statement of condition, ship's log and personnel files to us. Captain of the Line Lennart Out.'

'Captain?' Lycarin's exec asked, looking at the sprawling, patchwork-coloured Black Prince. 'Do you think this detachment will be, ah, beneficial for our careers?'

'I have heard of that ship.' Lycarin said. 'Half legend, half horror story. More than a hundred times her own tonnage accounted for. Wanders from sector to sector, barely accountable, always looking for another fight, another scalp. I feel as if we've just been ordered to take up formation on the Flying Ralltiiri.'

'That bad?' Perseverance's exec asked.

'Sealed datafiles received.' A voice from the Pit- literally- said.

'Staff conference.' Lycarin announced. 'Ready room, now. And scan around you. How many of the ships on your sensor picture survived their association with her?'

Someone else was distinctly unhappy at the thought of close cooperation with the veteran Destroyer. Fortunately, he knew Lennart well enough to express his doubts.

'Captain Lennart? Captain Dordd, Dynamic. Are there orders for us?'

'Yes, as a matter of fact there are- you're technically under Sector Group Anacreon, aren't you?' Lennart replied.

'Detached to transport Kor Adannan. You're not seriously- give me a moment.'

Lennart could guess that that moment involved moving to his day cabin to avoid having his crew overhear. He was right.

'Jorian-' Dordd hesitated.

'It's Captain of the Line now, so we're still officially on last-name terms. To smenge with it. Let me guess- you don't want your crew to know how much, or how little, confidence you have in them?' Lennart suggested.

'I was expecting to have at least three months to work them up to efficiency. I was expecting to need six. Captain, they've been coasting along in barren space, without any real threat, without any real oversight for that matter. I don't want to have to say this, but I doubt we could take this ship into any but the most minor combat and come out well. They just don't know how. They might rise to the occasion, but it would be moral cowardice to agree to bet their lives on it.'

'I expected as much, but I'm glad you had the guts to say so.' It had been bitterly embarrassing for Dordd to admit to, Lennart knew. 'You left before- well. At this stage in the proceedings, I would rather have a ship of questionable efficiency commanded by a captain I can trust than an adequate standard under unknown loyalties.  
'That, and at least your problems have conceptually easy solutions. I'll transfer some of the cadre over to you to give you something to work with, help train your people up, but we have too much need to move fast to let you have that much time- besides, if we leave them out, it could damage your crew's confidence badly enough that you'll never work them up to any real standard.' Lennart said.

'I'd be lying if I said I was happy about that, but we'll do what we can.' Dordd replied.

If the situation was that delicate, that Lennart was prepared to put up with a ship in as poor a state of efficiency as the Dynamic, then the only decent thing to do was pitch in, and hope he could get his crew up to something like a minimum acceptable standard in time to matter.

'I'd be lying too, if I said it was all going to work out just fine. Would you settle for "not as bad as you think it's going to be?"' Lennart suggested, facetiously.

Dordd laughed, but shook his head. 'The morale point being that, if you're still in the mood to take the piss, things can't be that bad…'

'See? I told you you would get the hang of this. The one thing that does worry me is your taste in junior officers. The man you recommended to replace you as my XO, for a start.'

'Vasimir Mirhak-Ghulej seemed like the logical candidate, he had all the paper requirements for the job- what did he do?' Dordd asked.

'Only tried to arrest half the fighter wing for a steel beach party. He- well, I have him under administrative punishment and I'm hoping for his sake he isn't daft enough to take his case to Adannan.'

'So I did him no kindness recommending him, then.' Dordd said, gloomily.

'Oh, perhaps; if this gets him the therapy he needs. Datasquirting to you, incidentally- situation update and operations plan. We're going to need your ship, we'll do what we can to raise the standards of the crew.'

'Given unpaid, half starved opposition with eye problems, we might not do too badly- I suppose you want a statement of condition?'

'That too.' Lennart said. 'You can start with an easy job. Rendezvous with HIMS Comarre Meridian before she drifts too far outsystem, and tow her back to a stable orbit over the planet. It's just manoeuvring, no great pressure, no great hazard, something easy to start with. Watch your crew closely, the line between being aware of them and breathing down their necks- no amount of theory can tell you where that is, you have to work it out from experience. Take time to work with them, but I'll be running squadron exercises as well.'

Lennart dropped the link, contacted Engineering. 'What is it, Gethrim?'

'Sudden surges are a standard method of test, I admit, but did the entire hyperdrive system really need that stiff a workup?'

'No, but Commander Lycarin's nervous system did.' Lennart replied. 'In all seriousness- Perseverance, the ship we just pulled that stunt on, is probably the only ship we're obliged to turn our back on that actually could prove to be a serious and immediate threat. It was worth a little stress to the drives to have them scared of us.'

'Right. I'm sure you make this stuff up after the event.' Mirannon snorted.

'Two problems I need to talk to you about anyway. First of all- the entire crew are going to be put through midichlorian counts. The old 'blizzard of data' plan. Can you suggest any method of hiding your and my files in there?'

'Of course, it's perfectly simple. We-'

'No collateral damage.' Lennart stated.

'Stang. All right, give me time to think of plan B. Would the second problem have to do with the trigger happy madman who melted one of his own turret subassemblies, put five thousand hours on our repair estimates and one point four million on the Venator's?'

'How much of that did you hear?' Lennart asked.

'All of it. Clusterkriff. Not really his fault, although that isn't going to stop me reaming out his ears with an inspection RPV. They're in hiding, they need a medic and an interrogator.' Mirannon stated.

'They might need a 'noodle incident'. Worry about that later, and your first priority is that turret. Give me full firepower as soon as you can.' Lennart said. Glancing around the bridge, Brenn was trying to catch his attention.

'Skipper, has it occurred to you that this could be a golden opportunity? Adannan has the authority to sanction, oh, all sorts of things.' Mirannon's basic position hadn't changed, he was merely considering exploiting Adannan before trying to get rid of him.

'Silver lining round a kriffing great thundercloud, maybe.' Lennart said, dropped the link.

'Sensors? Anything?' he asked.

'Yes, sir. One trace incoming, fairly close, medium-small.' Brenn informed him.

What to do to this one? 'Get me a predicted drop point and-'

Brenn was grinning. 'Look at it on maximum zoom.'

Lennart did. 'Her trace is…feathery. Recent drop out, recalibration for tactical approach?'

'I think so. Probably a false bounce; begin descent, withdraw, deploy later. Probably close to the planet and part-sheathed in it's clutter.'

'Then point us that way. Oh, and tell Mirannon to watch closely, we may need another repair estimate.'

Black Prince rolled round to bring her guns to bear on the planet; there was a partial flare behind her, as of a ship skipping off the light boundary from the far side, it faded; emergence flare milliseconds later. Followed by an active sensor sweep.

'Nice try. Identify.' Lennart com'd the new arrival. Demolisher class.

'Obdurate, Lieutenant-Commander Karl-Anton Raesene. Reporting as assigned to Objective Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod.' The medium frigate's commander came on the com terminal; fair haired, embarrassingly- for Lennart- correct in uniform, young and enthusiastic.  
Lennart had hoped for that, counted on a ship with a sound reputation having at least some people on board proud enough to do their jobs properly. It was still nice to be right.

'This is Lennart, Black Prince Actual. You're the senior unit of your division yet here, and a very fast journey time at that. What were you detached from?' he asked.

'Distant escort duty, Captain. We detected a suspicious trace and were in pursuit, in this direction anyway, when we received orders to divert and join you. I assume we can expect action?'

'Oh, I dare say there may be some possibility of it.' Lennart deadpanned. 'Were you part of Obdurate's crew at the Battle of Zelpher's Rift?'

'Yes, Captain. I was a junior gunnery officer at the time.' The battle of the rift had been a complex operation, between central- Imperial forces and rogue elements of Collophi sector group, on the edge of the outer rim. Their objective had been an old droid mining operation- both by and for; an attempt to set up a hidden fortress/resource world by the Confederacy, partially complete, cut short by the master signal being taken out in the last act of the formal war. The renegades had been seeking a bolthole, somewhere to run to. It had been years before the formation of the Alliance, otherwise that was where they would have gone. They tried to scrape up some remnants of the Confederacy instead.

The actual fight had been a running encounter battle, loyalist and renegade scout groups clashing with each other across two hundred and fifty thousand cubic light years, force units breaking up and reforming, the situation beyond both sides' ability to control. Obdurate had distinguished herself in defence of a troop convoy, when she and the standing escort had fought off a Victory-I and crippled her.

Outmassed six to one, out-teratonned twenty to one, the medium frigate had performed well above herself and been transferred out to a regional support group; how she had found herself here, in this backwater, was a question Lennart would have to put off asking for now, but not too long.

'Briefing documents will be sent over. The short version- lots of Rebels.  
'The larger units of the formation will be spending most of the next fifteen days repairing damage and working up; I'll want your fitrep, but I intend picked medium and smaller elements to be responsible for perimeter security and preparatory reconnaissance. If you've come even close to maintaining Obdurate's standards, that means you.' Lennart informed him.

'Sir, we've been doing escort run after escort run. We've prevented a few attacks, chased off some pirates, but we haven't had much opportunity to heat up the guns. Give us that, and I think I can promise you a happy crew.'

'That's what I wanted to hear.' Lennart said to raise a reaction, looking closely at the holo image to discern if Raesene wasn't just feeding his superior officer an acceptable line of hooey. Apparently not. Well, probably less than he himself usually did, anyway. Little twitchy, though, he'd go over the recording later, just to satisfy his own suspicions. 'What's your loadout?'

'A mixed armoured batallion- navy troopers, not stormtroopers. Mostly repulsorlift. Two squadrons of TIE/ln, one of TIE Bomber, one of TIE Sentinel.' Good; the Sentinels were freakish- looking craft, something like a light freighter cockpit mated to a TIE chassis, designed for long- duration sublight cruise as system patrol craft. Very few of the Empire's current crop of customs and light system defence ships had any kind of disabling ability; one type didn't even carry enough troops to make an arrest.

That detail would take work, but a quick-response, long-haul fighter with ion cannons to back them up was an at least semi- logical fix for half the problem. They had some missile ability, and supposedly there was a full blown strike fighter variant in the pipeline- Vigilante, Phantom, something like that.

That was a future problem. For the meantime, there was a job to do.

'During the action, we detected a rebel observer ship roughly 90 light years out. They're likely to run some kind of recon sweep through here, for post battle analysis if nothing else. We have engineering work to do, so you're the response element. Chase them off, chase them down if you can, but don't let them lead you more than half an hour's transit time away.' Lennart instructed.

'Aye, Aye, Sir.' Raesene replied, a little too enthusiastically maybe. Lennart attached the sensor-picture of the rebel observer ship and broke the connection.

Their 'engineering' work was, to all intents and purposes, scavenging. Kestrel, the rebel Recusant, had been cleared, nobody on board; Penthesilea still had a prize crew. Work teams from Black Prince would raid both ships for spare parts and expendable ordnance, drain off their fuel cells, and any specific systems they thought were worth appropriating.

Mirannon already had a design prepared for additional bracing around the axial defence turret mounts- reinforcing two of them to carry one each of the Recusant's prow superheavy turbolasers. The Venator's torpedo launchers would go, as would the parts and tooling for any particularly useful elements of her fighter wing.

On Obdurate's bridge, Raesene turned to the two Imperial Security Bureau men who had remained carefully out of shot.

'He accepts you.' The senior of the two said. 'A good beginning.'

'This is a filthy business.' Raesene replied. I don't know why I let you talk me into this.'

The junior of the two started towards him, the senior held him back, and said 'For the sake of your own ambitions, of course. There are millions of men of your rank, and you have risen as far as you ever will- unless someone takes an interest in you.'

'I know,' he admitted, 'but why did it have to be you? Spying on my own superior officer, it feels more like betrayal.'

'You are far past the time to back out. Turn away now, and the best you could hope for is to remain in obscurity.' The younger of the two said, in tones the said he was looking forward to demonstrating the worst.

'Jorian Lennart is a renegade in the making.' The senior man said- grey haired, round faced, grandfatherly until you looked into his eyes. 'He is not a rebel, not yet, but he is certainly guilty of severely incorrect thought.  
'It is your duty to assist the Empire in this, part of your oath as an officer as well I believe. Your ship has a fine reputation; an offense in itself, but still, an aid in this, it makes it more believable.'

'So,' Raesene said, taking his life in his hands, 'who smiled on your career and moved you up the ladder? There's an officer of the privy council on board that ship. If he alone isn't enough to keep watch on a renegade and do what has to be done, what are you doing trying to second guess him, and who for?'

'I'll let you hurt him later.' The senior agent said to the junior. 'Lieutenant-Commander, you would be wise to stop asking questions like that- before you become more trouble than you're worth. Conduct yourself as a loyal agent of the Empire, fulfil your end of the bargain and we will all come out ahead.'

They left the bridge then- the naval trooper guards saluted them as they passed.

All come out ahead except Lennart, the frigate's commander thought, bitterly. Was it for this that I joined the Empire, to spy on my own command structure? To blackmail and eventually betray a man and a ship who have hunted down more of the Empire's open, armed enemies than those security weasels can count to, while they play their backstabbing games?

Is making Commander worth it, if this is to be the price? And if not, he thought to himself, what in the void am I supposed to use for a way out?


	24. Chapter 24

Hurry up and wait, then get it done by yesterday isn't as bad as it used to be with stasis technology, but what I really need, Mirannon grumbled to himself, is a time stretcher. Something to put extra hours in the day. The question is, would it take me longer to stabilise and perfect than it would give me back?

Technically, this fell under the heading of 'other business', but it was the job he felt like doing.

The "unarmed" combat classes. He was going to be ferociously busy over the next two weeks, making sure the sixteen thousand men he had said he needed to repair the Comarre Meridian worked effectively, didn't trip over each other and did the right jobs in the right order- and resisting the urge to join in himself with a hypermallet.

Two of his men were sparring with them. Powered down, but still hefty pieces of kit- the whole point of the exercise was to pick the people he could safely leave in charge of the training, while he was busy elsewhere. That and to relieve his feelings about their now-resident dark Force adept.

It was not the only bout taking place in Main Machinery-2. Some of the tools they were using were very interesting, to certain people.

There were enough stormtroopers involved in the classes to pass the information up the chain of command, until it was very firmly intercepted by Omega-17-Blue before Adannan could get hold of it. They hoped.

"A lightsabre-like object" was the description they had received. This was not as improbable as it seemed- perhaps Mirannon's Force abilities had finally chosen to manifest. Partly, it was a relief - he became their problem rather than Adannan's.

They brought the flamers and flechette launchers just in case.

As they saw the sparring ground - a rough ring of cleared space in the middle of mounds of semi-intact machinery - they realised that the description was probably an understatement. He was fencing with a plasma torch.

First two on one, then three on one; the blades were not personalised, all dimmed bluish-white, with their containment fields set high enough that they were functioning as blunt instruments, and the Jedi-hunter team watched mesmerized at the multi-sided duel.

'What form would you say that was?' Aleph-One asked Aleph-3. 'Is that possibly Juyo?' watching one blade looped around another and flicked out of the owner's hand, another battered aside followed by a knee to the groin.

'Who, Commander Mirannon? Homicidal Madman form, I should think.' She replied, watching a blizzard of probing attacks tease one of his opponents' blades out of position for an up-and-under gutting shot. 'In any case, do the forms of lightsabre combat still apply with welding gear? I'm fairly sure the civilities don't.'

'More importantly, what do we do about it?' she continued, watching the big engineer sidestep a thrust, follow it back, push the blade past the guard position, pivot on it and lay his cutting edge on his opponent's throat.

'Is he even assisted? Brute force, yes, that I can see-' as he smashed a blade aside, lunged for a touch over the heart, feinted the same trick on the next man, rode the return stroke into a circular parry and disarmed him- 'but not the Force.'

'Which may be just as well for all of us.' Aleph-One pointed out. 'If he can manage a display like that without it. Try him.'

'With pleasure.' She said. 'I believe it's even my turn.'

Mirannon had just run out of opponents with his chosen weapon, and called the two hypermallet wielders over - a chief and a leading artificer; when it came to violence, the chief engineer was no snob. He was aware of the troopers, but too focused to think on it, until she walked directly up to him.

'You seem to be quite the swordsman, Commander.' She said. 'Would you favour me with a bout?'

Innuendo from a stormtrooper, yet. She did have a sabre; the one she had intended to give to Lennart. She slung her rifle and drew it.

'First blood, or to the death?' he said, looking at it sceptically. 'How many power settings has that thing got?'

'Ah.' She said. Apart from the on switch, none. The red-bladed ones seldom did. Well, one if you included 'dismember'.

'You may have faced them, but you're not supposed to use them, so I don't expect you have much training time with that,' he said, and she nodded slightly.

'Good with a vibrorapier, good enough to think you can cope with a weapon that's just different enough to deceive you with the similarities - you expect me to be daft enough to fight someone with little specific skill, with a weapon that can't be effectively safed, in a sparring match?'

'Commander, the way you're throwing that thing around, yes, frankly, I did.'

He wandered over to one of the junk bulwarks, picked up a sheet of light repair plating, said 'Sign your name in that.' and threw it at her. It was base-steel, intended to be used as one layer of a laminate, 3mm thick and half a metre square, Mirannon spun it like a frisbee. She realised what he meant in time to snap her lightsabre on, cut at it as it flew by her head.

Name? What was that? She tried for a quick angular v, two curls, a reasonable approximation of A-for-Aleph-3 on a moving, spinning target, she got one stroke of the A and one loop of the 3, piercing through the steel and nearly taking the corner off. One of the mallet-men swung for it and knocked it down out of the air.

'Remind me to tell you about some of the interesting things you can do with liquid metal shuriken one of these days.' Mirannon said. 'Not too bad, especially if your name is !u. On guard.'

He activated the welding torch and moved in to attack her. The irrelevant things you notice at a time like this. The blade was very fat by lightsabre standards, almost conical with significant internal volume, the ripples in its containment field indicated massive internal pressure. Connected to a belt powerpack, in form it was similar to a very, very early lightsabre from perhaps fifteen thousand years ago. She wondered if he knew that.

Then there was time for reflexes only, as his blade darted around her. A dipping lunge, she pushed aside, started to return to guard position - realised his blade was still moving around and down, about to take her leg off - she moved to push it out and away, then sidestep back behind her own blade - and he had moved through recovery to a swinging attack on the direction she was moving in.

She shifted stance in midstep, managed to block but left herself totally out of position, swung for his blade trying to knock it clear to give herself time to recover, it flickered out of the way and came to rest against her lower left rib.

'Again.' Mirannon stepped back, recovered to guard position, let her come for him.

She tried a quick triple pass, the almost-weightlessness of the lightsabre moving faster than the eye. Pure instinct, pure reflex - perhaps the Force, probably not - the first cut at his right shoulder, he batted away outwards, recovered to catch the second sweeping low and upwards, the third came in towards his right side; he caught it just above the hilt, somehow the blades stuck together, she tried to kick his feet out from under him but he got an elbow to her throat first.

The gorget of her variant armour took it and she managed to keep hold of the lightsabre, pulled it free, rolled backwards- the blade at arms' length and outwards to avoid rolling onto it and scorching herself. She bounced to her feet, again wildly out of position, tried to bring the sabre back into line, a perfectly controlled short jab smashed it out of line again and the welding torch flickered back to a spot over her heart.

'It was you.' She said, realising. 'Lord Adannan's danger sense has been spiking ever since he got here. He's been assuming it was Captain Lennart, but it isn't, is it?'

'On the very few times he's come down here for this, Jorian Lennart has been moderately good.' Mirannon admitted, lowering the blade. She turned her sabre off.

'The skipper has some natural talent, and I don't doubt he'd fight like a mother wildcat for his ship, but he's too busy to put in anything like the time he needs to be as good as he could be.'

'Most of the time we deal with wannabes.' She admitted. 'People who feel a tingling of the Force within themselves and hardly have the presence of mind or self control to make anything useful out of it. We were only privileged enough to bring down two genuinely master-level Jedi - and I doubt if they were as good as you are.'

'Look at the difference between your sabre and this torch.' He said, holding them side by side. 'The sabre has count it, one mode. On. None of its complexity has to do with the weapon itself. This cutting torch, a device intended to do a job, has, amongst other things, a steerable blade.' He said, demonstrating. It twisted and extended at will. Her eyes bugged out.  
'I could, for instance, soften the blade enough to let yours bite, trap your sabre, and extend the point forward to slice your head off. If you're standing too far away for that, I can thin out the tip and produce a plasma jet indistinguishable from a flamethrower. I can punch through armour too difficult to slice, and fan the tip out to undercut it or burn through what's underneath. I can control the blade precisely enough to engrave copper and whittle wood.  
'Most importantly, I can choose not to do this if I don't want to. The basic functionality is sound. All of this with what is, metaphorically, a ploughshare beaten into a sword. Why is your elite weapon of the upper class so feature-impoverished?'

'I don't entirely understand what you're getting at.' She stalled. She did understand, and it was not a particularly comfortable thought. 'Are you suggesting that the Jedi were missing an obvious possibility?' she had to ask.

'No,' Mirannon said, 'I'm saying that the sabre is a weapon designed for the mentality of people who sat around all day going "ommm." I learnt to disrespect the Jedi for their hazy, unworldly nonsense years before they were made illegal, and although he had to work with them more closely than I did and got used to not saying so, I reckon the Captain feels the same. He believes, and so do I, that to learn the ways of the Force now would lessen him overall, by taking too much away from what he already is.'

'You were trying really hard to put that politely, weren't you?' she said.

'If you would prefer 'get your Jedi powers here, free frontal lobotomy included', I could say it like that.' The big engineer stated.

'And if the so-called light side of the Force was the only option, I'd be forced to agree with you.' She said. 'It isn't. The Jedi Order was, although I doubt they realised it, in an awe of the Force that amounted to fear. The age-old, permanent enemies of the Jedi were those who did not choose to suppress their passions, or their wits, to gain the Force. The few who chose to live in the world rather than apart from it. Men like Vader, like Adannan. People the Jedi hated, for surpassing them.'

'Nice pitch, but it isn't me you have to convince, it's him. That is not going to happen- because he doesn't trust you. He believes that you are as much a pawn of the Imperial system as the Jedi ever were of their setup.  
'What would you defy that for? If it isn't him, he's not going to take your word on the subject as anything other than the voice of the system.' Mirannon said, feeling unusually out of his depth. This probably did count as "social engineering", and although he hated job title dilution in a way only a man responsible for a hypermatter reactor could, he was prepared to concede the sense of it just this once.

'That's more than just a theoretical statement, isn't it? You have some appallingly stupid bit of dirty work that you can't manage by yourselves.' She said, with more scorn than it deserved, because he had touched a nerve. He was probably right, kriff him.

'I should have realised you were too good an actress for me to lie to.' Mirannon said. 'Mind you, you're not too good a swordswoman. I need to know where you stand.'

'In case you decide it ought to be in several pieces? I should dare you to try.' She said, more defiantly than she felt.

'It's seldom wise to threaten a man,' Mirannon said, 'with a remote control for the ship's compensator systems. It's a simple question. Do you want him badly enough to stand by him when the dreck hits the turbines?'

After what she had said to her sister, there was only one consistent answer. It terrified her- but perhaps better that than a lifetime of regretting not saying so. 'Yes.'

And there, it was said. Now all that was left to do was go and play Ruusan roulette with a blaster carbine, or wait for the inquisitors to catch up with her which was probably about as much a guarantee of death - either that, or try to live up to it.

Mirannon looked almost as surprised as she was. 'Good. In the new workshop spaces along the port flank, there's that bit of dirty work waiting for someone to go and do it.'

'I could just recant and walk away.' She said, large parts of her mind telling her that it was a good idea.

'You won't. Turn your back on your old life, you have to reach out for the new. Don't screw it up.' Mirannon advised.

I won't.' She turned to go, then as an after thought turned back and said 'You know, Commander, you have an interesting line in recruiting technique. A combination of emotional appeal, moral blackmail, and lethal force. Almost like a Sith yourself.'

'Gah. Don't be so elitist. There are lots of people who use that combination.'

When his orders reached him, Group Captain Konstantin Vehrec was indulging in his favourite pastime; antique flying machines.

The CV(T) Voracious was based over Altyna V, a large gas giant with what amounted to a planetary system worth of moons in its own right. It was an excellent place for crowded space and multiple planetary environment training.

One of the worlds was a partial terraform, an attempt to keep a working ecology going to support a major mining operation which was there, and the terraforming made difficult, because of the tidal stresses Altyna-V-b was subjected to.

Volcanoes in the middle of green fields were a depressingly common sight, and Vehrec was racing towards one batch at just under Mach 3, seventy metres up. His aircraft was a chemical powered job, single stage to orbit turboscramrocket- the last transitional stage on the way to true spaceflight. Corellian in original design, aerospace bomber by intent, supposed to operate on the fringes of the atmosphere, the replica he had put together turned out to have surprisingly good nap of the earth performance.

It wasn't as if he needed the adrenalin for anything else, after all. So he might as well ride a huge blended wing delta laden with volatile chemicals, at slightly over its own wingspan off the ground, at sanity-denying speed into broken terrain littered with sharp hillsides, gas, ash and the occasional flying lump of molten rock.

Anyone whom he could be bothered explaining to would already understand. He was a geriatric by fighter pilot standards, a decorated veteran of the Clone Wars, not a clone himself - although he had narrowly avoided being used as a clone template.

At least, he thought he had; he hadn't seen too many younger iterations of his own face around.

They hadn't invited him to this war; he was officially past it. That, unreliable, or both. He had retired five years after Mustafar, as the supply of new targets dried up to a trickle, and gone into business as a cargo hauler. Done fairly well, too; he had the rank and the connections to make it as a legitimate trader, without having to resort to the grey economy- although he had been sorely tempted at times, just for the sake of the thrill of it.

That, and it was always fun to watch the reactions of the customs boys when he opened the hatch and they came face to face with an Imperial Cross that they were required to salute.

It had palled after a while, though, and when things started to heat up again with the various armed movements that got themselves a political face and turned into the Rebel Alliance, it had been an easy decision to sell up and rejoin the Starfleet.

Working his way back to his former rank hadn't been too much of a problem, but it was frightening how few of his former wingmates were still in the service. They new breed called him a maverick, a barnstormer, and wouldn't trust him with an active combat command. So they gave him the air wing of a training carrier, that he could use to warp thousands of young minds. He wondered sometimes if there was any being in the universe to whom that made sense.

That, and too old for combat - bollocks. When he had sold the freight business, he had spent the credits on rejuvenation therapy. His senses and reflexes were as good now as they were when he had been eighteen, maybe better. Which only added to the perceived unreliability.

Perhaps they had a point. He was old enough and wise enough to know exactly how stupid low altitude high speed flight in a (currently) airbreather through volcanic terrain was, and here he was doing it anyhow.

Technically, it was a bombing run. He had two probe droids to drop down volcano mouths on behalf of the miners, which made this a legitimate civil cooperation and propaganda exercise - not that he cared greatly about the thin veneer of officialdom.

Roll round one hill, climb briefly over another, throttle back over a ridge then thrust down the fissure valley, and above all feel the air, this delicate primitive thing - only molybdenum coated steel after all - bucking and jolting over a black kaleidoscopic wilderness of cooling lava, trailing a mile-high roostertail of dust and ash behind it.

He would literally crucify any trainee TIE pilot he found being this stupid, but he had more hours in his logbook than some of them had been alive for.

Flick of the wingtip, round one hill to the left then bank right past another, aircraft kicked in the belly as it briefly entered and left ground effect going over the saddle; hold it down, remember the area - he had treated it as a simulated strike.

One fast overflight for visual and sensor recording, descend behind the horizon to strike altitude, roll in with the terrain as cover, kick one probe out in a deceleration capsule from very low overflight - that would be accompanied by a shoal of defence suppression missiles on an actual target - extend out, dive-toss the second probe and roll off the top and break for orbit from there.

Partly to let him watch the effect. The probe released perfectly into the basket - steered itself into the volcano mouth he slung it at in a slight bank. His com beeped; no time now.

Zigzag out - skimming off the thermal from one volcano, allowing that to help roll the aircraft down the next canyon, rear cameras recording the plume of lava as the massively armoured probe started to swim down the vent.

Break left round a steep hill, climb for altitude - ramjet mode struggling in the polluted air, gaining thrust as it climbed out of the vog, rolling out to high speed and medium altitude, then a hard bank round to begin the zoom climb to lob the next probe into the second volcano mouth.

The com unit beeped again; he ignored it - he was busy. Tomorrow it would be time to go back to teaching combat manoeuvres, if he was lucky and the latest batch were ready for that. If not, back to formation and gunnery. Right now, if he was irredeemably branded as a barnstormer, then by stang he was going to barnstorm.

Slight change of plan. He had a head up display marker and the probe on manual release, waited for the point in the air, then released the probe on its ballistic arc, then rolled off the top of the climb and dived after it.

He chose his margin of safety and ran it out, skimming a thousand feet off the peak and five seconds ahead of the probe, actually passing underneath it on its way down.

It plunged into the caldera sending a shower of lava splattering high into the sky, and Vehrec firewalled the engines on his way to orbit. If only they would let him do that with proton bombs.

Transition to rocket on the edge of atmosphere, not a problem, and chase the low orbital transfer station where he had parked his fighter. For all the multi-mach performance of the transatmospheric bomber, its absolute abilities had more in common with a kite on a string than they had with his late-model Avenger.

He had docked the antique and was heading back to Voracious, free time over and ready to resume the daily grind, when he finally remembered to check his com.

It was a recorded transfer order; as all the orders concerning the trainee pilots were copied to his desk, he more or less tuned it out. Heard it all before. It was only when he heard the words "Objective Pursuit Squadron" that he paid any attention at all.

That was a heavyweight combat force, often amounting to a light destroyer squadron;Sector groups hardly ever formed them. Some lucky smegger was moving up in the world.

Then his brain did a fast rewind to the start of the message and he realised he wasn't the 'cc' this time, he was the primary addressee. He, and Voracious, were going back to war.

It was only vacuum that prevented his howl of delight being heard back on the planet.

'Captain,' Shandon Rythanor said to him, 'we have a potential issue.'

'With what?' Lennart asked his sensor chief.

'The minor craft, skipper, the light and medium corvettes. Remember the Identification and Designation Regulations of '20?'

'Of course.' Lennart had been on the staff at the time. The point of them had been to curb the number of minor ships, the military-conversion Corellian corvettes and the like, commissioning with names almost ludicrously far above their station.

Names like Leviathan, Behemoth, Deathbringer, Vengeful, Devastator - a fair few of the names which had since been applied to destroyers.

'Do you remember the first response to the problem?' Rythanor said, smiling.

The alphanumeric strings that had been hung on the smaller ships, medium corvette and below, had not exactly been popular, especially not with those crews who had their ships de-named. Correct Thought had not been the bugbear then that it was now.

'Of course. Nicknames, unofficial names. Nose art. You're not telling me-'

Rythanor called up a sequence of images, of small Imperial warships, sporting nose art. Lennart watched.  
'All right, this is almost acceptable, "the masked discombobulator" isn't so nuts. "We distrain upon you" has a certain wit. "Fuzzy pink rancor", though - this is getting worse.'

'I know.' Rythanor said, bringing up the nose art of the "Polyfather of Eristic Excess."

'That's…interestingly anatomically impossible. There are public decency laws I can use to have that turbolased, you know.' Lennart said, grinning at the sheer chee k- or cheeks - of it.

'It's not the strangest.' Rythanor said, reaching for the pointer.

'I'll view them all later. How do they get away with it?' Lennart marvelled.

'Don't ask me, but it's going to make squadron battle reports sound kriffing odd.' Rythanor pointed out.

'Yes, in practise this is just going to be too silly.' Lennart said, choosing not to formally mention that he approved in principle.

'Draft an order, all ships to be referred to by tactical numbers- 851, parent formation, Yod, subformation, A through D for the lines, number within the line counting down in seniority. That and somewhere, in the staff sections of the sector fleet, there is a maniac.'

'Sir?' Rythanor asked.

'Whoever was responsible for these, either failing to prevent them or who actively encouraged them. Find them for me.'

'Aye, aye, Sir. Are we delivering a letter of protest, or of commendation?'

'Neither. A mind which ran this wild is a mind we might want to know more about. Once you find them, ask them what else they know about what these ships have been up to.'

'So we're looking for a loose cannon in Patrol Type-Command? I'll start narrowing that down.'

'When you have it down to a hundred or so possibilities, just call them. If they answer 'yes?', they're not the target. The one who picks up the com and says "Maybe?", that'll be them.'

Normally I like to let things bubble out in the text as far as possible, but this is going to require some explanation ahead of time. Enigma, that's you.

E. Nygma is a 'semi-retired' Lignyot (Imperial Intelligence cryptographer), who, ah, the stresses of the job caught up to him. They are a notoriously strange bunch and probably the only part of the Star Wars universe the Riddler would be able to walk up to and get a job offer from.

After largely unsuccessful rehabilitation which failed to significantly reintegrate his personality, Doctor Nygma was transferred to the Ubiqtorate's equivalent of DVLA Swansea. He was embedded in a semi-covert role in the support services of a sector group with something to hide, and basically told to work out what they were up to by spotting patterns - do what he used to do, at a much gentler pace and far lower stress levels. Occupational therapy, to slowly rebuild his talents. A plague of illegally sanctioned and anatomically intriguing nose art is among the least of the problems this has caused.

Franjia had refused sedation and was reading through a datapad. Olleyri had handed it to her, keyed to her touch only. Details of four craft coded on it, not part of the new program they had been considering in the defence daily; part of the establishment answer.

All, in fact, relatives of the Starwing. The first was tentatively designated as Xg-1A Starwing-II; the wings were swept forward, and broadened out at their base to where they seemed to blend with the fuselage. Repulsors, hyperdrive and shield generators all migrated out of the main fuselage into the thick wing roots to make room for larger engines and reactor. It was supposed to come close to the speed of a TIE/ln and surpass it in agility. It also collected two extra guns, probably heavy autoblasters.  
Very nice- if it was possible. In theory, a sensible, solid, valuable step forward. How expensive the thing would be, whether it lived up to the promises, and how easy to look after in practise- if it ever made it into durasteel, they would find out. It looked good, though.

The information on the middle two was very sketchy, for different reasons. One appeared to be so near to entering service, at least in alpha-test form, that all the details were being locked down and heavily classified, even in an internal official document. Some kind of flying missile dustbin. The other was barely past the concept stage, a true twenty-plus metre gunship heavily influenced by the escort shuttle and a little by the IPV.

The fourth was an idea she instantly fell for. Missiles worked, and worked well for the most part. Normally, a starfighter's gun armament was limited in usefulness to other fighters, ground targets, and very small ships or those already so badly damaged that they were ready to come apart anyway.

The idea of a heavy gun carrier had cropped up from time to time, most notably with the B-wing ancestor H-60 Tempest which had mounted two short-barrel fleet melee light turbolasers. It had been a good idea but the rest of the spaceframe had let it down - slow and a pathetically easy target. At least the B-wing could sometimes sidestep fire it couldn't outrun.

The beast she was interested in was labelled the Xg-2 PulsarWing heavy gunboat. Blended wings with filled roots again, slightly enlarged, and it lost all the rest of the armament and the lower two wings to accommodate oval faired housings for two full rate Taim & Bak XX9 long-barrel light turbolasers. The blurb promised the same rate of fire as from a capital ship mounting, and the specifications seemed up to it- major power upgrade, engines to carry the extra weight.

They would be expensive beasts, somewhere in the two hundred kilocred range, but their potential as transport and escort killers, screen breakers, long range snipers- she wanted one.

'Squadron Leader?'

Franjia looked up. She was still wearing a breathing mask; it was squirting aerosolised bacta and other growth factors into her lungs. She had managed to reprogram the vocoder to her own voice.

'Yes?' It was a stormtrooper; as far as she understood the insignia, an assistant squad leader, infantry.

'One of the other patients, Sir, one of the rebels wants to see you.'

She put down the datapad, thought about it. It was probably M'Lanth. She had to, really.

'Who's more heavily wired in, he or I?' she asked.

'He is ambulatory, we have him under guard.'

'Bring him over, Corporal.'

A rebel sandwich emerged: M'Lanth on a mobile drip and instrument stand being hustled along between two stormtroopers, and another two behind him with blasters levelled. They were quite aware of how she had found herself in the medical complex - they had been part of the boarding group on Penthesilea - and they were taking no chances.

'Before you open your mouth,' she said to him, 'I want you to know that I'm in here because one of the madmen on your side tried to blow out one of your own ships with four thousand troopers and seven thousand rebels on board. Now rant away.'

That took the wind out of his solar sails for a moment, but he recovered. 'How could you do it? How could you just blunder over to us, say all those things, get us believing you, shoot at your own side, all fake?'

'Poor security.' Franjia said, bluntly, hoping that would be enough to get him to go away. It wasn't. 'We were picked because the Captain thought we would be plausible, ordered to do it, ran on nerves throughout and we were kriffing glad when it was over.'

'The fact that you had to resort to backstabbing tricks-' he began, forcefully because he knew it made little sense.

'Resulted in thousands of your people becoming prisoners rather than dust.' Franjia said. 'I know some of them might prefer to die in battle, I would, but I'd suggest you consult with them before advocating that.'

'Don't you dare lecture me about the chances we face opposing the Empire.' He said, heedless of his escort.

'If you can manage not to get yourself shot, I might tell you about some of the chances we face working for it. This is no time for principled defiance, so pull up a chair.' Franjia virtually ordered him.

'Thank you, no.' he said; the stormtroopers pulled one up and shoved him into it anyway.

'I wanted to see what they were doing to you. How they were treating you as a failed defector. Then I hear that you're being praised as a hero for feeding us the bait that led us into a trap.'

'Lower deck rumour. We didn't even get a mention in dispatches - largely because the captain knew we would be ashamed of it.'

'How can you use words like 'shame' after what you did - how can you even pretend to have a sense of shame?' M'Lanth asked.

'Funny, isn't it? I'm supposed to be the sterile, faceless technocrat, and you're the one who's supposed to derive their mandate from the common people. Perhaps it worked because you're closer to us than you like to think.' Franjia taunted him.

'We fight for a cause, the cause of freedom.' Standard issue rebel doctrine. He wasn't that daft, but he was stressed enough to cling to it like a mantra.

'Really?' she laughed. 'Freedom to do what? People are weird. We have an entire galaxy of room to breed oddballs in. I believe that, and I'm trying to prevent it. You're fighting for it and you refuse to admit it exists.'

'What does that excuse?' he asked her.

'Maybe nothing, perhaps everything. Let me ask you this; if you had received the same orders - to infiltrate the other side by pretending to defect - what would you have done?'

'I would have refused.' M'Lanth declared, improbably.

'What? With the fate of the galaxy at stake, and the evil Empire to be brought down by any means necessary?' Franjia prodded him.

'No, because I'd make a terrible undercover agent. I couldn't betray my principles, couldn't fake it convincingly.'

'Now that, I can believe.' She said. 'In all seriousness, you behaved decently, with dedication and comradeship, and fate chose to boot you up the backside for it. Aron and I were simply the steel toecap of the day.  
'We did what we had to do, what we were sent to do, and being the instrument of it doesn't stop me feeling sorry for your crappy luck.' She said, worrying herself by how sincerely she actually meant it. Even if it was true, that didn't make it officially acceptable. Time to start taking ruthless lessons again, she thought.

'I'll never forgive you for that.' He said, words steeped in bitterness.

'Didn't really expect you to. Do you know what happens to you next?'

'What, you mean how much of an ever I'm likely to have?' he said. 'The disintegration booth.'

'Not on this ship. We don't do disintegrations.'

'I had no idea you were so moral,' he said.

'Never mind morals; it's the energy budget we're worried about. You're far more likely to get shot in the back of the head and dumped into the biocycler tanks. Unless…' She wondered how to put it in a way that would get through to him.

'No.' he said, determined.

'Listen, hear me out. Your rank and file are going to get prison terms, and they're going to be horrible. They're going to be worked and abused until they wish they were dead, but they're going to survive to be released back into society - as an object lesson. They'll visibly have been made to suffer for supporting the Alliance, but they haven't done anything individually notable other than that. Noncom and petty officers, junior officers, longer terms that they may or may not make it out of. Senior officers and ideologues, not good. As a squadron leader, you're borderline.' She informed him, optimistically.

'You support this system?' he said, incredulous.

'Aron and I didn't have time to make up convincing false backgrounds, so a lot of what we told you was true enough. I was a police pilot, and if there was a time when I could have turned my back on the Empire, it was when I was a young cop, just getting my mind around the law we were supposed to enforce. As I put time in, and met more and more of the people we were enforcing it on, I started to see the logic behind it. Your theoretical position may be attractive, but it's straight out of dreamland.

'Most police are professional cynics; after a while you lose the ability to maintain that most of the people you meet are liars and idiots simply because your job brings you into contact with a disproportionate share of them, and start believing that all the people out there to meet are in fact liars and idiots. I skipped out of the worst of it, went into search-and-rescue, but even I can't think of more than four or five beings I would trust to live a life without the law watching them.  
'It may be harsh, even drastic, individuals may get caught and squashed in the machinery now and again, but I am still convinced it is the least worst option. Even if I had sufficient personal reason to turn on the Empire, I think I would still believe that as a general rule. And you don't have to be one of the squashed if you don't want to.'

'Oh, no. I'm not falling for that. I want to live, but not at the price of pissing on everything I've lived for. Not at the price of turning on my friends and comrades. I will not betray the Alliance.' He said, with fragile determination.

'Barring utter fluke, you're going to die. A fighting chance is one thing, but not like this.' She said, trying to come up with something that he would actually listen to.

In his position, she might start out with false bravado, but then to think what it would be like, turning your back on so many of your own, becoming a pampered pet of your enemies and having seven thousand ghosts curse you every night - she looked at his eyes and realised she couldn't do it either.  
She tried anyway. 'How will what you live for gain by your death? How would it serve the Alliance? How would letting the legal process destroy you serve the future? Your cause is not a gang of failed ex-senators or vengeance-mad adrenaline monkeys, I believe you when you say that it is freedom, but how are you supposed to do that except by being free?'

'Do I have to start quoting you to yourself? What you expect the Empire to do to us prisoners is not the way of a state that gives a flying kriff about freedom. And you know it.'

She glanced at the stormtroopers escorting him. 'The Captain would really like an excuse not to have to kill you.'

'What, the last undead twitches of conscience?'

'He wouldn't let his sense of morals get in the way of doing his duty. You are an active, declared enemy of the Empire, and unless that changes, you're going to be dealt with like an enemy.' She said.

'Then that's the way it'll have to be.' He said, defiant.

'Take him away.' She instructed the stormtroopers; they wheeled him and his drip back to the guarded section of the medical complex.

She went back to leafing through the datapad, enthusiasm temporarily sapped. It was harder to hate people and strive to kill them when you got to talk to them about it afterward.

Obdurate's captain was feeling relatively unoppressed for the first time in what seemed like months. He had a purely professional job to do, his watchers were off the bridge, and he could just get on with navy business, without worrying too much about what came after.

Black Prince's nav team had given him a route plot, and they had ridden it out. Now it was down to search procedure, a subject the confidential publications on changed with boggling speed. Exactly as fast as the Alliance came up with new tricks and the Empire invented counters to them, in fact.

They were in the approximate area. Their sublight sensors had nothing - the target had moved out of reach. It had done so under slow hyper, nothing radical enough to be noticed. Vastly increasing the area they had to search, the noise they would make doing so, and the chances the rebel had to slip away. The tactical book counter was to choose the most likely direction and plot a series of short, spiralling loops around it, passing through a cone centred on the rebel's most likely line of retreat. The operational counter was to call on the assistance of recon fighters.

Raesene didn't want to call for help; he wanted to earn Lennart's and his own crews' respect by doing this himself, so he had the navigation team plan the spiral search, centred on a nearby system.

If the rebels were good, they would know they were being followed - if they were very good, they would know what by.

If Obdurate picked up a trace, the rebels would aim for crowded space, lure the Imperial ship into a maze - asteroid or cometary belt - where at the very least, they could get her to deploy her own fighters, and then takeoff, fight past a few and force her to either abandon her fighter screen or lose time picking them up.

That would work if Obdurate wasn't loaded with Bombers and Sentinels.

First, catch your rebel. Obdurate began her first search pattern, a wide sweeping series of curves.

'Contact, Captain.' One of his pit sensor crew called out, part-way through the fourth spiral.

'Relative 220 minus 32.' Low on the port quarter; at hyperdrive speed and distance, one whole degree was an immense sweep of space, only a little better than 'over there a ways', but good enough to give cues to zero in on.

'Speed and course?' Raesene demanded.

'On course for…wait, non-match. The engine pattern doesn't check out. False alarm.'

This, Raesene thought, is how messengers manage to get themselves shot. Sloppy, inadequate reporting to tense authority figures.

'Next time, verify.' He shouted at the com/scan tech.

'Aye, Aye, Sir.' The comtech snapped off a perfect formal salute and turned back to his board, hiding behind officialdom.

Think, man, think, Raesene told himself. Light freighter, the rebel's a modified light freighter. Not exactly uncommon. Put the red hat on for a second. What's he going to be trying to do? If he's running, chances are he's clear away already. He can pretend to be civilian traffic, and…he won't be running away, will he?

'Nav, abort search pattern. Take us two light years off Ghorn, quietest approach you can manage consistent with right now.'

'Aye, aye, Sir.'

Obdurate made an unplanned re-entry; there was the inevitable minute of chaos while the navcomputer triangulated their position, Raesene hopping up and down for every second. Then she lunged back into hyperspace.

He tried not to pace the deck, far from sure he was right. Obdurate's hyper-to-normal space sensor capability was short-ranged and fuzzy, hyper to hyper better; he waited, willing a signal to show.

Normal to hyper was the longest ranged. Obdurate emerged in shallow-interstellar space to sniff for the rebel; Raesene trying hard not to spook the sensor crew. He didn't want to scare them into not doing a proper job - might already be too late for that. The temptation to stare over their shoulders was nearly irresistible.

He noticed a glimmer. The sensor-tech whose board it had come up on was twitching, unsure - unwilling to report prematurely, and making a hash of the analysis and identification procedure.

'Report.' Raesene snapped at- her, actually. Fair hair cropped to two millimetres length and dark-beige skin, relatively new out of training and quite badly scared.

'Light freighter class, identification in progress, Captain.' She stammered.

'Then proceed.' He said to what was now a bundle of nerves. The shift chief and the watch officer both came over to the console, worked the contact - Raesene stopped trying not to, went over to the other side of the bridge to pace.

They were old hands, had it locked down and an identifiable harmonic extracted in five seconds. It took them several more than that to believe what it identified as.

'Captain Raesene, you may want to verify this with your own eyes.'

The pattern was right. And? He didn't see what was so special about a ship named the Sunfighter Franchise. At least, not until the sensor watch officer crossreferenced to known aliases.

'Comtech, burst transmission, minimum bandwidth, to Black Prince; "Herding rebel in your direction. IDs as one of the known aliases of current Number Two Most Wanted. Request anvil."

On Black Prince's bridge, Lennart had been watching the search in progress. The message made him pause.

'Ah, now this is interesting. Shandon? Is it possible that Lieutenant-Commander Raesene is suffering from wishful thinking, or that there's actually something to this? Verify.  
'Oh, and, fighter bay-' the com techs knowing to route his words to the zone of the ship addressed- 'ready Beta and Gamma for launch. Brenn, come in on this.'

'I predict he's going for the light cone.' Brenn said. Meaning that the rebel would emerge in the outer edge of the kuiper belt, say sixteen light hours out - and so seeing what happened sixteen hours ago.

'He'll lurk and let it wash over him, hide in the ice. Let us spread out, and then fade away or do a speed run through the search line.'

'Plausible.' Lennart agreed. 'Which he do you think we're looking for?'

'No absolute-confidence solution.' Rythanor reported. 'They're running a low-level emitting mask, enough to change their engine pattern without adding enough to it to screw up a recon run. Whoever they are, they're good enough to be a worthwhile target.'

'Alternatively, they could be a perfectly ordinary combat-scout, using the fake ID of a famous rebel to get us scrambling around like headless chickens making all sorts of radiation they can monitor.' Lennart stated.

'Let's see what the group can do. Order "Colonel Pranger" here,' bringing up a map of the system and using a laser pointer, '"Spiral Eyes Joe" here, "Helga the Horrible" here - I was right, we do need tactical numbers - "The Iron Turnip" there.'

Com-Scan coded the orders up and transmitted them; two Bayonet and two Marauder corvettes started to move, building a vector and plotting short hyperspace hops to cover an arc of the cometary belt. In the extremely unlikely event of their needing that much backup, Perseverance was alerted to be ready to support them.

Speaker ping, followed by a voice Lennart rather wanted not to have to deal with right now. Adannan. 'Captain Lennart, I cannot help noticing that several ships of the group are starting to move out. What are they doing?' The throne room had repeaters for the bridge systems installed. The work crew should have known better than to reactivate them - or possibly he was simply looking out the window.

Lennart wanted to tell him it was none of his business. Finding a line of argument worth defending would be the hard part. That and really, could he get away with not reporting this?

'Lord Adannan, we have a rebel recon boat playing hide and seek in the cometary halo. Normally we wouldn't bother you about this, but its engine emissions come close to matching the signature of a very well known rebel. I can't think of a good reason not to maneuver to intercept, can you?' Which was sailing a shade close to the wind.

'Which very well known rebel? Dodonna, Antilles? Willard, Tallon, Hudsol?' Adannan asked. His hackles were rising, there was something very strange and very important about that unseen ship. Something fearful.

'Solo.' Lennart said, smiling.

'The man and his carpet who-' Sharply, Adannan's fears crystallised. If they destroyed that ship - all might be well, but the probability was low. If they managed to capture her, and there was a distinct possibility, then the heavens would fall on him.

He heard Lennart order out three more ships of the squadron to positions on the outer edge of the main cometary halo - Darxani, strike cruiser, Henchman and Jointure, Servator-class heavy corvettes. All carried ion cannon, and the plan was for the four lighter ships and the looming Perseverance to force the rebel out, pushing her into breaking for open space, where the ion cannon armed ships would be waiting.

Black Prince's navigation team were ordered to run continuously updated menus of short-jump courses for them, so they could instantly hyperspace on to the fleeing Falcon's tail.

'If you succeed-' Adannan began. His voice was trembling, and he could not, must not show weakness. A live Han Solo would attract attention. It had a terrifying near-certainty of attracting it from the being he was trying second-hardest in all the galaxy to avoid. Vader.

Mostly, Lennart was looking forward to the professional challenge, another part was studying Adannan and wondering what in space was wrong. What about that little ship could scare a dark Jedi that badly?

The correct answer was, of course, how it could involve him with another and vastly more powerful dark Jedi. Lennart didn't connect that; his mind was too full of vectors and sensor radii. He did question, though.

'Kor Alric? Is there something you ought to be telling me?'

'Is this not- excessive? Eight ships to take one?' Adannan stalled. 'Doesn't that do him too much honour?'

'He's notorious for not caring about the odds, so I don't think he'll mind. He's a credit to the old home turf, in fact - and we're only one degree of separation removed. When I was at Raithal I trained two of the men who went on to instruct him at Carida. I was looking forward to meeting him, myself.' Lennart said, concentrating mainly on the moving ships.

'We are in a security situation here, Captain Lennart. We cannot afford the galactic interest that this will bring. Let him pass by.'

'What? Excuse me, Kor Alric, but - he knows we're pursuing him. The hunt has already begun. Pulling the squadron back now would ring alarm bells in any competent spaceman's mind.  
'The rebels will wonder why we let him get away, the sector group aren't in top form at the moment but they still might manage to notice, and Region would throw a fit.' Lennart said, hinting that if the regional support group didn't find out anyway, he might tell them. What was Adannan on about?

'This man is famous throughout the galaxy; taking or destroying him would cause the entire galaxy to take an interest in me.' Adannan said, egotistically.

How are you going to do that yourself, float out after him with a jetpack and a lightsabre? Lennart thought, hopefully loud enough - this time - for Adannan to hear.

'Is there no-one on your personal staff who understands starships...well enough to interpret, at least? Who can advise you on what is and isn't possible, your personal pilot perhaps?' Lennart prodded Adannan, mind still on the chase, looking for the flicker in Black Prince's sensor picture that would betray direct contact.

They had picked it up initially at very long range, so why then and not now? Making noise - more than it needed to, to get their attention? It had worked, after all, managed to pull an inside run on their response unit, and caused an elaborate and expensive trap to be set up. Rythanor had been cautious, unwilling to commit, and for a reason. Whoever it was, they were good at fakery.

The Death Star Incident had broken clean through the normal news control procedures; the sheer enormity of the shock of it had paralysed the security organs long enough for all kinds of video and sensor-telemetry to leak out. After that, any attempt at a cover story had been shutting the stable door after the tauntaun had bolted.

Which raised three thoughts. One of them, that the target had managed to draw a massive first response from the Imperial squadron. Second, that stealth was something their probable-but-not-certain opponent did not have in his blood. Solo had been forced to learn it, but it wasn't his first tactic. First deception and con-artistry, the more flamboyant the better and hiding in plain sight if at all possible, second relying on speed and power like the pirate-gunman he was, last and least slithering about the shadows.  
Third, that the whole sorry mess, from Alderaan to Yavin, had been a spectacular blip in an otherwise solid record. The Imperial censors were usually better at information control than that. They could certainly keep something like this under wraps from enemies and public, until long after it was too late for anyone else to react to. So whose attention was Adannan so afraid of? Was it the censors themselves?

That would stand further, quieter, thought.

In the meantime, no signature in hyperspace led to the obvious conclusion that he wasn't there. Was it possible that something that small and fast could have run in close without giving itself away?

'Brenn, plot this.' He expanded the system map out to the surrounding space, and drew a trajectory in hyperdrive on it. A curling, helical approach.

'Work out what we would see if the target came in on that path. Com, contact Obdurate, tell her to jump to- here.' Zooming back in, and picking a point in the cometary halo not quite opposite to the main search group.

'Do you really think he's that good?' Brenn said, already bent over a holographic plotting table.

'He's Correllian. Of course he is.' Lennart said, only half joking. 'How does it look?'

'Something that small, and able to make that-' glowing numbers in the air illustrated his assumptions- 'much speed on that little of its power, we'd spot her in post-battle analysis, not at the time.'

'I presume you have kept enough processing power spare to plot intercept courses for us?' Lennart asked.

'Only a few dozen.'

'Captain. Am I to understand,' Adannan's voice again, 'that you are attempting to engage and capture this rebel, in violation of my direct orders?' Still fear, now anger also - partly anger at being made to be afraid.

'Not trying to catch him would look suspicious also. Best security solution, we nearly catch him. Shoot him up a bit, force him to break and run. That and that alone should look realistic enough to satisfy all parties. Apart from those who really want him caught or killed.'

'I am an agent of the privy council, and you will do as you have been ordered.' Adannan bellowed.

'Did I say that I wouldn't? Give me room to do it properly.' Lennart broke the connection.

'We need a liaison officer.' He said to the command team. 'Someone to stop us snarling at each other.' The entire bridge team huddled into their seats and tried not to look at him. He hadn't really expected them to be daft enough to volunteer, but that left him with the burden of selecting who got to be thrown to the wolves. Later.

'Kick out Beta and Gamma squadrons - to drop points evenly spaced here for Beta, here for Gamma,' laser-pointing on the inner edge of the halo, two long arcs.

'Instruct them to converge on a point here.' Marking on the outer edge of the main halo where the rebel was now expected to be. 'Flush the rebel towards Obdurate's drop point here.'

Aron was still getting used to the idea of flying a Hunter; using it to chase one of the most famous pilots in the galaxy was not what he had expected for a first run. He had also seen Gamma deliver mediocre results too often for comfort. A widely spaced sweep line suited him just fine.

Smenge, he had forgotten just how irritating the TIE whine could be. Systems check, all green, initial course away from the hangar bay, listen to the nav unit bleep annoyingly as it drank in the course from the destroyer's nav computers - then the blue-white blur again.

Emergence, nerves jangling, just in case there was a lump of ice in front of him; no - although Gamma Eleven did break hard to avoid a large iceteroid - which turned out to be half a million kilometres distant. Somebody's sensor suite's not working properly, Aron thought.

Gamma did have a higher casualty and higher pilot turnover rate than Epsilon. They were greener, and they would need to be trained harder to get up to a decent standard. They were operating under distant control, spread apart; no close formation work. Under these circumstances, his job as leader boiled down to knowing when to throw the central directions away and just react.

It only took a few minutes for him to have something to react to. There were the big objects, stable in their orbits, but there were also a few which had been destabilised, probably by the passage of a starship, into colliding and splintering.

The relatively weak long-range scan on the Hunter registered four clouds of dirty-snowball fragments that would be worth taking a very close look at. One of them was close enough to his flight plan that he could get away with diverting for a more detailed scan. He edged over in that direction. Two and three were nearby. They all started active scanning into the cloud. 'Lead, Three. Faint contact.'

First the handoff, then direct detection came up on Aron's sensor globe. 'I see it too. Converge and pursue.'

The image was reflecting off dozens of separate splinters, imperfect mirrors that they were it was impossible to get a firm ID.

Aron switched to active ultra-short wave, scanning in a band they barely reflected and didn't re-reflect, and flew on that, refusing to let the icy maze confuse him; ordered the squadron to do the same. He lost the contact briefly, but Two hadn't.

'I see it! YT! Engaging!' Just a shade overexcited, then.

The laserfire made a good steering cue. Flashes of green, a long sustained stream of red, three white flares of bolt meeting shield, and then a scream, 'Ejecting!'

If he survives, I'm going to amputate his exclamation marks, Aron thought, curving round one splinter, then breaking radically up and left as a speeding, battered-looking ship nearly impaled him. He managed to recover before he sideslipped into the ice, and took a couple of shots at the fleeing transport as it dipped and weaved through the light and splinters.

In space this crowded, better him than me, Aron thought. He could accelerate up to match its speed, but it had the shields and armour to ride out hits from the smaller shards that he didn't - he had to take much bigger risks to catch it than it did to run away. Kriff, he thought, I'm going to have to. Got to set an example.

In short wave, reflections were no longer a problem, he could distinguish one lump of ice from another, but that only meant he could spot blind alleys when he saw them.

'Work your way through. Save the speed for open space. Follow it and herd it, don't get yourselves killed pushing in for a close strafe.'

Some of his charges were more dextrous than others; the target seemed to be heading for one of the largest halo objects within reach - if it was any closer to the star it would class as a moon. Run up to hyperspeed in its shadow, Aron thought, that's what I would do.

Only himself and Nine arrived in time to see it happen.

They emerged at the edge of the object's wake in time to see it pause and slow to a relative crawl. The big objects, the ones that would drop a YT out of hyperspace, were far enough apart that he could get a clear run - there were too many small ones that could stop a Hunter for them to follow him. Here and now it is then, Aron thought.

Then things took a sudden turn for the better and he didn't have to die after all. The thousand-kilometre halo object suddenly lit up from within with green light as somebody started turbolasing their way through it from the other side. Obdurate.

The ice moon cracked and shattered. Aron ducked back behind a two kilometre chunk to use as cover, and the rebel freighter bolted forward, making distance as a hail of LTL fire punched through the fragments and reached out after it.  
It kicked and tumbled as bolts found it, the Demolisher slower than the rebel but chasing after it to keep it within gun range as long as possible. The YT was in flat-out flee mode.

Aron, and the Hunters starting to come up behind him, had to pick their way through the expanding shell of moon fragments - they wouldn't get close enough in time to get their own shots in.

Obdurate stayed on the rebel's tail, harrying it and trying to catch it in a cone of fire as it weaved and twisted out of the way, heading for the next worthwhile piece of cover. The YT hurdled it, breaking line of sight long enough to get a few moments of straight course, pointed at the clearest patch of space, initiated.

Obviously not the Millennium Falcon after all, Aron thought, the hyperdrive actually worked first time. Now he had to round up his squadron, call in search and rescue for the ejected, and go back and work on them until he was confident having them on his wing.

'Well, I think that should be fairly convincing.' Lennart said to his bridge crew. 'Transmit orders, the rest of the search group to return to holding positions, Obdurate to retrieve Beta and Gamma squadrons then rejoin.  
'I'll have a word with Obdurate Actual myself later about fighters, cosmic debris and friendly fire. That and remind me to thank Captain Solo, if we ever do meet.'

'What for, exactly?' Rythanor asked.

'For providing the first real evidence we have that Adannan is playing his own game instead of the Empire's.'


	25. Chapter 25

'No. That is not how this will happen,' the overweight man behind the desk said.

'Did you actually manage to read as far as the signature?' Vehrec growled back. Years of private trading between the wars had taught him finer grades of perception, that not all bureaucrats were rear-echelon scum; there were good ones and bad ones. The hutt-for-a-grandmother lardass in front of him was definitely one of the bad ones.

Unfortunately, he was also a full Commodore and the Commander, Base Station Altyna.

'Counter-orders from Sector Group.' The Commodore brandished the datapad.

'Let me see that.' Vehrec took it.

The orders came from the office of the sector Admiral, countersigned by the private secretary to the Moff; in their own twisted way, they were a masterpiece of evasion. They couldn't counter Adannan's orders directly - the best they could do by that was enforce delay and garner suspicion, but they could modify them. Sector considered, it said, that this was a mission of unusual importance and danger. Usual flowery verbiage - all loyal subjects encouraged, et cetera - but the kicker was in the last statement. For all personnel not specifically mentioned by name, it was to be considered volunteer duty only.

'Now I wonder, where are you going to get a crew for that corrodo-mobile?' the commodore taunted him.

That was the biggest single problem. Not enough pilots, but between fellow-instructors and advanced training/refresher courses, he could put together a capable cadre, enough wing and squadron commanders to lead the rest and bring them on.

Most of the lower ranks would have to come from planetary defence forces across the sector. They would take time to assemble and work up. Re-equipment would be a problem too, and then, kriff it, controllers, ground crew, building up from a semi-retired, run down training ship to a fully active combat unit again - where were they going to come from?

He understood carrier operations, but mainly from the outside. What happened under the skin of the parent vessel, he knew enough about to understand just how little he really knew.

'You know, it would be a good move for the Alliance to strike here. Bomb the base facilities, kill the admin staff - they could do some real and lasting good for the Empire that way.' He vented.

Bile aside, that might work as the seed of an idea. The Base Station encompassed the Voracious and two smaller - escort - training carriers, a handful of freighters and transports to play exercise target, and a local defence line based around a Dreadnaught, two Carrack and a handful of corvettes, as well as the ground facilities.

He was willing to bet that a fair proportion of them would be in a sufficiently advanced state of cafard - bored out of their minds, essentially - to want to go and fight. That only left the problem of how to turn them into a worthwhile crew.

'Collect whatever wrecks, relics and maniacs you can. I will be interested in seeing how far under strength they are. Dismissed.' Vehrec saluted, trying not to extend two fingers in the process and almost succeeding, and stomped out.

Seventy-four hundred crew to find, less the skeleton thousand already on board - no, assume half of them wouldn't go. Sixty-nine hundred then. First stop, the signals shack.

It wasn't a particularly appropriate title for a square kilometre of antenna farms, deepscan domes, control bunkers and subsidiary facilities, but it had stuck. Primarily range monitoring gear, it also kept track of all confidential publications and information dissemination to the facility. What he needed was for them to, essentially, place a want ad in the local issue of the Defence Journal. Find the officer of the day, explain, possibly indulge in light bribery...

'Sorry, no can do.' Which was not the response he wanted.

'What do you mean, you can't do it?' he asked the duty senior lieutenant.

'Thing is, Group Captain, the operations of Objective Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod are, um, we're not allowed to put out anything about them. Classified beyond belief. Top security. We could probably be arrested just for talking about it.'

'Hm. Really? Well, if it makes you feel better about it I can shoot you; it certainly would improve my mood.' Vehrec said.

'Sir?'

'Oh, this is- this is kriffing ridiculous. I'm supposed to find volunteers for a mission that's so heavily classified, I'm not allowed to talk to anybody about it and ask them to volunteer?'

'Put that way, Sir, I can understand how shooting people might start to seem rational.' The duty officer said, smiling nervously and sidling away to use a memory stack as cover.

'I think I'll start with the commodore.' Vehrec walked out, leaned against the outer wall of the main admin block of the shack. Options. Examine options.

One, walk back in and threaten, bluster, and possibly shoot people until he got what he wanted. That had its drawbacks, however temporarily satisfying it might be.  
1a, do the same from the cockpit of a fighter. Advantage, bigger explosions, less effective countermeasures. Still unproductive.  
Hack in. Problem, he needed a slicer for that, which meant finding a suitable cadet or hiring a private contractor- both insecure and legally dubious. Might not work, anyway.  
Appeal to higher authority. Could work, they could as easily hang him out to dry, assume that if he couldn't solve a simple problem like that he wasn't worth bringing along after all. He would look inept.  
Lower authority? Spread the word via the noncoms, flight technicians, and the rest of the bush telegraph? Speed and clarity of transmission would be a problem. Nemoidian whispers. That would be the backup plan.  
Find a loophole. Promising, but there had to be one there to be found.

Ah. Technically, according to his own orders, he was part of this unmentionable, unquestionable, ultra-classified outfit. All he had to do was make that work for him.

He strode back in past the guards. Draw his gun and put a shot into the ceiling? Nah, there were dish antenna up there.

'Lieutenant, read my orders. Our preceding encounter was a test. Let's see if you can do better this time. On my authority, as the senior ranking officer of the Sweep Line, Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod,' waving the datapad with his orders encoded,  
'I commandeer this facility. By security regulation 1227-LF90A, signed by the Sector Admiral and confirmed by the Base Commander, this operation is top secret. You may not question, you may not discuss among yourselves. Clear?'

The signals people looked blankly at each other, each trying to work out if this was legitimate or not. Time to yell at them again.

'Why are you impeding the progress of an important, dangerous and highly classified operation? This is what I need; a clear secure terminal connected to the main subcom broadcast tower, Station-wide access. Move it. Now.'

The stormtroopers shrugged. They appreciated an elegant solution to a problem as much as anyone else, and it was pot and kettle anyway, one attempt to fiddle the system countered by another. Until further orders were received, he had the right of it. The signals team collectively reached the decision that they were equally likely to be blamed either way, decided they resented the Commodore more, and stood aside.

'Base Station Altyna, this is Group Captain Konstantin Vehrec. As you may not know, training carrier Voracious is due to be recommissioned as a fighting destroyer, attached to a regional support unit, 851-Yod. For whatever reason, Sector considers this to be unsafe, and has decided on a volunteer-only crew.  
'I'm going. This is a front-line, active service duty, with all the promise of action, promotion and preferment that implies.'

Which was pure sales pitch, as anyone who had ever even come close to understanding the meaning of the word 'casualties' knew.

Hold on a minute, mate, part of his brain reminded him, you took absolutely no persuasion at all.

Shut up, he told it, and carried on. 'Many of you, I'm sure, joined up to do something, not just sit here and slowly fossilise, to serve the empire, not be a glorified servant - to fight for the Empire and take your chances doing so. Well, this is the chance now. When we have a crew, we will be moving to join a subdivision of one of the most distinguished combat units in the Starfleet.  
'If I have to use my personal bird and stretch a tow cable, Voracious is going to war. I want a fighting crew, because I expect what we'll mainly be doing is fighter based search and destroy.  
'Because of the level this was classified at, you're not supposed to be listening to this, but I'm ranking officer present, and if I decide that it's worth sacrificing security for efficiency, then that's between me and the commander of 851-Yod.

'We can use people in any capacity, but I mainly need ground crew, gunnery and engineering for the ship. Anyone who's interested, get a message to me or my office.'

Which usually meant cockpit. Not a bad plan, actually- might keep him from being arrested.

The signal shack was filling up with people, a mix of a few would-be volunteers and rubberneckers come to watch the chaos; among them the second shift.

'Group Captain?' one of them asked. Shift commander, a senior lieutenant.

'Yes?' Vehrec looked him over. It was a big base, he knew most of the people on it vaguely. Caliphant, that was his name - not a range officer, base com team.

'Sir, consider me a volunteer.' Enthusiastic but trying not to look too eager, good. Young, late twenties maybe, dark haired, broad-shouldered, medium height.

'What can you do?'

'Navigating Officer on an Interdictor, acting captain on a class-1000.'

'How did you end up running a shift at the shack?' Vehrec asked.

'My own fault. We captured a rebel courier, reeled it in and we were holding it for analysis, and I started playing with their computer. Only managed to crack the cursed thing wide open. Nobody believed me when I said it was pure dumb luck, I got transferred to signal analysis.  
'I didn't fit in - didn't really want to - got tagged as trouble, bounced around a bit and ended up here. If this involves open combat, count me in.'

'Yeah, you look like you could use some laserfire in your life. Consider yourself pencilled in as navigator, for now.'

Commander Vianca Falldess was a survivor and the descendant of survivors. Roughly a thousand years ago, her planet had been literally bombed back to the stone age.

It had happened during the chaos of the Light and Darkness War, when most of the galaxy was looking away. The mode had been unlike either side - small high-relativistic projectiles, aimed or self-aiming at centres of industry. Kilograms each, megatons of yield, not enough for extinction, never mind geological damage. Just enough to leave a defenceless and exploitable resource and population base.

Perhaps it might have happened that way if the war had gone on longer, but whoever it was - and they had gone to some lengths to cover their traces - had run out of time. They had not followed up with invasion, and the attack remained a bolt from the blue, endlessly argued over and analysed.

Rebuilding was a long and painful process - not helped by smugness, patronising interference, and rampant corruption and graft that nearly ruined the planet all over again. The Republic reconstruction crews had been evicted at spearpoint, the money ploughed into an autonomous orbital defence net, and the inhabitants of Bya Amadi had decided they would be better getting to their own feet.

In rebuilding the technology of the past, they had managed to make many of the mistakes of the past all over again. Unified planetary government had been a casualty of the bombardment, and combat between troop blocks armed with pike and musket was still well within living memory.

Commander Falldess was very much a warrior-aristocrat, and the daughter and descendant of warrior aristocrats; she had put in ten years on sailing warships before the death of the Republic, starting from when she was only nine years old.

When their world had been approached by the Empire, it was in the first flushes of the new order; before, as some would have it, the revolution had been betrayed.  
Imperial Army construction units had done a thorough and honest job of ending factionalism and bringing their world back into the space age, and then-Acting Lieutenant Falldess had applied without hesitation to join the Imperial Starfleet.

It had been a long, hard road to get this far. After a ten years' apprenticeship, in command of drunks and lunatics who were a far greater management challenge than the relatively well drilled and behaved sailors of the Imperial navy, leadership was almost trivial. Even space tactics came without too much difficulty.

What made her head spin was the mechanical side. She had no instinctive feel for the technology at all. On a sailing ship, she could feel the forces that acted on her directly, she could know in her gut what the state of the ship was and what she was going to do next.  
On a starship, for all the romantic nonsense about sailing the infinite sea of night, no. They were simply too big and too stable; for years, every morning, she had woken up in a state of advanced panic, total absence of subliminal clues leading her subconscious to think the ship had hit a rock and gone aground or something.

She had had to virtually relearn how to see to be able to make sense of holographic displays.  
She had managed to struggle through on a mixture of cramming and memorisation, guesswork, bluff and dumb luck amounting to a minor miracle. Also partly on aristocratic poise: I leave that sort of thing to the menials don't you know, let the little people take care of it.

She had been at first ashamed and embarrassed by that, and then absolutely horrified as she realised how many of her fellow cadets were flaunting the same attitude, without seeming to think there was anything wrong. At the very least, they had the elementary familiarity of growing up with it all. She didn't.

She had indeed been often wrong, but had held to the other half of the old adage, never uncertain. Deck officer, section officer, up through the ranks to exec and her own command eventually - many times confused, sometimes embarrassed, occasionally totally lost in the technicalities.

What she did have was the determination, and in some respects the primitive instinct, of her apprenticeship. She read people much more easily than she read machines, sifting real from false confidence, fakers and bluffers from professionals. What she didn't know herself, she could pick a crew who did.

There had been blunders and mistakes along the way, gains and losses. She had lost one ship, a Carrack damaged beyond economic repair in a brawl with Republican revanchists, married and been widowed, and eventually found herself here with a heavy frigate command, on escort covering patrol.

Early middle aged, late youth she kept telling her reflection in the mirror, perhaps she could go further, but she was unsure whether, in the atmosphere that pervaded Vineland Sector Group, she wanted to.

Too many times, they had received positive orders that had put them in the wrong place. Far too often, negative orders not to be concerned, not to worry about or react to something that had later turned out to be important. At the very least, the sector group was far more concerned about making sure there didn't appear to be a problem than they were about dealing with it, whatever it was.

At worst, active complicity. Whose? Not everybody, surely? There was no evidence. She may be suspicious - morally near- certain - but without knowing exactly who and exactly what, there was nothing to do but try not to breathe too much of the stink.

Now this. She had looked Jorian Lennart up in the dictionary of naval biography; a quasi-official production, crippled by security regulations and frequently informed by no better source than gossip or prejudice. In the absence of a real Navy List, it would have to do.

There was certainly a wealth of gossip and prejudice to go on. Joined at the end of the early period of the Clone Wars, present as a navigation officer in one of the ships of the covering force at Geonosis, strong hints of exceeding his authority - as nav, he performed as the de facto exec, as exec he ran first a Meridian, then Venator, as de facto captain. Present and decorated for his part over Coruscant.

Transferred to an Imperator, one of the earliest - same ship he commanded now, in fact - the captain, relative of a notorious rebel, had resigned in circumstances dubious enough to trigger an investigation. They had decided to court-martial Lennart, and for some inexplicable reason busted him down three grades, from commander and acting-captain to lieutenant.

That made no sense. It was far too light for a severe punishment, far too severe for light punishment. Either he had done something which he should have been shot for, and the court had been friends of his, or they had wanted his blood but that was the worst they could make stick. Probably the former, considering.

Logistics command, then planning, then training, then four years on the staff of the Raithal Naval Academy - extraordinary for someone whose career should have been dead and gone.

The DNB admitted that he was one of the best purely combatant officers the Starfleet had, as he had proved once he got his ship back, but called him all sorts of unreliable and unpredictable stopping just short of outright traitor.

Whether she trusted its judgement any more, considering what it said about her own sector fleet - not as much as she used to. This would be interesting.

That and, if she was reading the org chart correctly, her ship was going to be the most senior in the second heavy recon line, with a Demolisher, two Strike, three Carrack, two Servator, two Bayonet and four Marauder attached.

Fifteen ships total, mounting ten heavy and eighty-six medium turbolasers between them and carrying six battalions and eighteen squadrons; a force shaped far more for meeting engagement and encounter battle than strict reconnaissance.

Who was going to be in charge of that lot? Not her, surely?  
Excitement and terror combined. As senior officer, she had led a four-ship skirmish line of basic Corellian and improved Assassin-class corvettes, with crews of no more than a couple of hundred each, even counting troops and pilots. Escort duty; co-operation with the other ships of the skirmish line had been easy, in face of the common enemy: the merchantmen.

The regulations on the behaviour of private haulage ships were draconian, and for good reason. Keeping them in formation had been a never-ending misery, that had reduced itself into the navy attempting to provoke the merchants into behaving badly enough that they had an excuse to shoot them themselves, the merchants trying every trick they knew to annoy the navy, or simply leave the convoy. They considered they were at more risk from their escorts than they were from pirates and separatist remnants, and after a sufficiently long period of both sides messing each other about, it was probably true.

That was it as far as multiple unit command went. Now four ships of real force, five medium and six small, and a purely military mission. Half of her wanted to leap at the chance and the other half was scared to death.

'Signals, we have the link? Good.'

'Yes, sir, we've been asked to wait- here he is.'

A long-faced man with hollow cheeks and bags under his eyes appeared on the holotank; substantially better uniformed than Lennart. Which was pretty much inevitable under the circumstances.

'Afternoon, Firmus.' Lennart began, casually. 'How's the new toy shaking out?'

There were shocked gasps and stifled laughter from behind Lennart as his crew realised who he was talking to, and how.

'Captain Lennart,' Firmus Piett began coldly, 'we are very busy, and this is the wrong time for a social call.'

'That's Captain of the Line Lennart, me old chucker.' Lennart said, putting on an outrageous accent.

'I do want to know what that big bird can do, but- in accordance with regulation whajamacallit,' the text appeared at the bottom of the image as Lennart waved a hand dismissively, 'reporting contact with one of the fake ID's at least of someone your current lord and master has an unhealthy interest in.  
'Pretty good, might have been the real thing. One of my squadron put about twenty or so LTL into him, didn't seem to do much…you'll probably catch up with him eventually, tell him I said hi.'

Piett was having difficulty keeping a straight face. 'The sheer unlikelihood of your remaining in the service continues to amaze me. You are living proof that no personnel reliability program can ever be one hundred percent dependable.'

'And thank the Force for it. Have you ever met a hundred percent dependable personnel? I've got one at the moment, swap you. Trust me, you'll be wanting to bang his head through a bulkhead within days. Maybe even succeeding, if the rumours about how far the mass saving on your ship went are true.'

'Considering the state of that moving heap of dirt and indiscipline you call a command, I don't see what you're basing that on,' Piett snapped back. He was in a state of high irritability.

'Losing control of your tongue already? I do sympathise. It must be exhausting, running a crew of toy soldiers brainscrubbed out of the initiative they need to blow their own noses,' Lennart retorted.

'Demanding and rewarding, far more so than being in command of a gang of privateering tinkerers,' the officially acceptable officer said.

'Ah, now there is a tempting notion. Have you considered just how much a renegade star destroyer could get away with, and for how long? If they sent you and that overgrown steam blimp after us, we could manage to get away with it damn near forever.' Lennart prodded him.

Piett reddened slightly. 'Careful, Firmus.' Lennart continued. 'You're in danger of looking like you're not undead.'

'I have more important things to do than to listen to you insult the finest ship in the Imperial Starfleet. Good day.' He disconnected.

'Skipper, you really think you can get away with that? Calling Lord Vader's flag captain "me old chucker"?' Brenn asked.

'It won't make things any worse than they already are. He's loathed me ever since I met his half-brother,' Lennart said, grinning.

'Who? He's not listed in Piett's file.'

'No wonder - different mothers; he spells it differently, and they hate each other's guts. I bumped into him when I was at Raithal. If I ever write my memoirs, in the chapter headed "Things I don't understand how the kriff I managed to get away with," surviving a night on the piss - actually, a fortnight - with ISB Colonel Max Pyat without being either shot, court martialled again, dying of liver failure, being displaced into a right-angled reality or simply driven into a straitjacket will head the list, even above the Palmus Viridis.'

'The practical purpose of that, of course,' Lennart said in a rather more sober tone of voice, 'the regulation I almost quoted is entirely genuine. We were obliged to report that, and a standard form fired off through official channels would do exactly what it was supposed to - direct official attention to the situation. I think I pretty much managed to do so in a way that guarantees it won't be taken seriously. The chance to take a few pokes at Firmus Piett is simply a bonus. I mean, he was almost as unprofessional as I was, except I was actually trying. Look at the colour of the man's face, how old before his time he looks, how badly he's lost his sense of humour. He looks under so much stress, there is simply no way he can possibly be enjoying that job.'

'Just in case, Captain, in the exercise schedule - would you like me to insert a few games of hide and seek with the Executor?' Rythanor, who as sensor officer was responsible for that, suggested.

'Probably just as well.' Lennart agreed. 'Assume they've finally managed to get the bugs out.'

'I didn't know you were so against the new fast dreadnoughts.' Brenn said.

'Oh, any ship which gives so many accountants heart attacks can't be all bad.' Lennart joked. 'Seriously, what's that thing's natural prey? It's gross overkill when it comes to the rebellion. We only need to win one battle in ten to grind them down to nothing in the end, and we're doing a kriff of a lot better than that. By the time that ship could see enough action to justify herself, the rest of the fleet could kill the Alliance off with decades to spare. So what is she actually for? Neither of us brought up the words 'renegade' and 'privateer' by accident.'

'Makes sense.' Brenn admitted. 'We're the only people with ships that hard to chase down and kill. She's for internal security, then?'

'Piett made his reputation bringing down pirates; the choice of him as a flag captain does rather point that way.'

'So you've just managed to infuriate a renowned pirate hunter, in charge of a ship whose unstated mission is to find and kill dissenters...why do I suddenly feel much less safe?'

'You and most of the battleship and cruiser commanders in the Starfleet.' Lennart pointed out.

'Bridge, Engineering.' Junior link officer. 'Search teams found Kestrel to be carrying one replacement prow turbolaser unit. Commander Mirannon intends to mount it in the third axial socket.'

'Good. Tell him to carry on.' Lennart replied. It was such a single-answer question, he would have known there was something else seriously wrong if the chief had thought he needed to discuss it.

'Now all we need is another hundred or so and we might be able to give the Executor a run for her money.' Brenn underestimated.

'The other thing is, skipper,' he said very quietly, 'you're playing both sides against the middle, aren't you?'

'What, you mean going out of my way to leave barbs that'll stick in Piett's mind, fester, get him thinking and trigger some kind of investigation? Would I drop Adannan in it like that?' he almost managed to sound innocent.

'Of course you would.' Brenn said, accurately. 'Report to him that you made it all sound like an irrelevance, too, but Piett, isn't that just playing with antimatter, more risk than the objective's worth?'

'Considering what I'm starting to suspect that Adannan actually wants, no.'

There was a knock on the chamber door. 'Jhareylia? Take it. If I shout, duck.' Aldrem ordered, flipping the fire selector on his T-21 to full auto, moving to cover her.

Jhareylia glared at him. 'Easy on the melodrama, it shouldn't come to that.'

'Optimist.' Aldrem said.

'Put the blaster down, I need to talk to you.' A female voice none of them recognised came from outside the door.

'Damn, she's sharp. What do we do?' Hruthhal hissed to Aldrem.

'I'm starting to feel conspicuous out here. That and I don't think you can shoot me through an armoured door.' The voice said.

Jhareylia cracked the door open. Kick it the rest of the way, Aleph-3 thought, go in low and use her as cover, hit him stomach or groin, grab his gun, and hope there weren't more than, say, four of them.

Jhareylia's eyes widened at the sight of an exotic variant stormtrooper; she tried to slam the door again.

Kriff, Aleph-3 thought, shoved it open and grabbed the woman in the steward's uniform, used her as a human shield while she tried to work out what was going on.

Fifteen of them. No, eighteen. One with a squad-support blaster she was looking right down the muzzle of. She glanced at his rank and ID patches: high noncom, gunner. Probably was good enough to blast her round the human shield. The others: huddled in a corner were Adannan's two twi'lek pets. Both without their leashes.

This was definitely the trouble she had come looking for. Throw her human shield at the gunner and follow up? No, he would simply pivot on his back foot, clear line of sight and blast her to red mist. She released Jhareylia who ducked away, put her hands up.

'I think I might be on your side.'

'Dewback. Stormtroopers follow orders. Whose orders are you acting on?' the senior chief said, aiming at her centre of mass.

'Somebody has to be the exception that proves the rule.' Aleph-3 said, trying not to sound too aggressive- or too submissive.

'We know she's with him, Pel; take her now.' Gendrik advised.

'No.' Jhareylia - and Suluur - advised him.

'You've met my sister?' she said.

'Clones.' Suluur grunted. There were only slightly more of him than there were of her.

'If I'm under anyone's orders, it's probably Chief Mirannon's. He said you had a problem you might need professional help with.'

The rest of them had closed the door behind her, brought more light up. This was a heat control chamber; they were in the control room for one of the giant neutrino emitter banks, visible beyond the transparisteel.

'So what kind of professional help can you offer?'

'Apart from being a qualified field interrogator? Apart from being special operations? What sort of professional help do you think you need- actually, don't answer that.'

'You are either legitimate, or a very good actress,' Aldrem said, not lowering the gun.

'Both. Although you'd better hope I'm not- because legitimate is a kriffing strange idea coming from someone who's just kidnapped the Special Assistant to the Privy Council's personal pets. You need a medic as well, by the way.'

'Would that be you, too? With a medkit in your belt pouch where we have to let you draw it, oops it goes bang, or have one of us play human shield again?' Aldrem said, still not trusting her.

'Relax, I know my limitations. In close quarters like this, I could take any six of you, maybe any eight - but not all sixteen.'

'So we outnumber you two to one. Right.' Suluur said, impressed by her totally matter of fact tone. 'Pel, we can shoot her or not shoot her. I don't see how vaping her would get us any closer to sorting this out, might as well take the chance.'

'Whose side are you on - sorry, damn fool question under the circumstances.' Aldrem said to Suluur, and to Aleph-3 'Get on with it.'

'I have done the basic field medic course, and had to use it a few times. I'm the best you're going to get without having to answer too many questions,' Aleph-3 said, kneeling down beside the two twi'lek and unsealing her first aid pack, 'but the squeamish may want to look away, because I don't think keeping this pair alive in the long term matters. Just long enough to extract a little evidence from.'

'Signals, command hookup enabled? Good.'

The crest of Fleet Destroyer Squadron 851 hovered in the display tank for several seconds - the round-headed winged mace - before fading out to a flag bridge, the nerve centre of the Urbanus-class light cruiser Jorvik, squadron lead ship.

Ranked tiers of com and sensor consoles around central display platforms.

'Admiral Rawlin? Lennart.' For once, he saluted, properly.

The rear-admiral was a giant of a man; he radiated personal authority with the effortless determination of a man who did not need to shout to make himself heard, did not need to draw himself up to be seen.

'Jorian.' They had known each other since the clone wars. 'Advice, fire support, both?'

'Both, probably, but first I need somebody to backstop my judgement on this,' he asked. He explained the situation. The initial rebel contacts, the discovery of the sector group's fudging the numbers, Adannan, attack, infiltration and trap, and now this.

'So you have managed to get yourself in the position of attacking a fortress planet, with possibly unreliable assistants - at least one crack ship in there, though - a dubiously loyal sector group at your back, under the political command of a man whom you suspect may be about to go renegade and try to take you with him, and a political time bomb to deal with even if you succeed. You don't get into trouble by halves, do you?' Rawlin said, amused and worried both.

'I was hoping that just this once, there might be enough to share with the rest of the squadron?' Lennart admitted.

'Honestly, it's the politics of it that scare me more than anything else. What do you remember, personally, about the hundred and eighteenth?'

'Hmm. We do know that the destruction of the Jedi was accomplished by some kind of neural trigger, an emergency insurance system embedded into the clones. We're not supposed to know that much, and certainly not supposed to speculate further along those lines,' the admiral said, clearly intending to do so. 'Are you assuming that Ord Corban has remained relatively untouched, apart from what use the Alliance has managed to make of it?'

'Them or whoever else. The Sector Group is training a lot more pilots than it needs, and I can't help wondering where they all end up. Between that and the Falleen Moff - you know the rumours about Prince Xizor,' Lennart suggested.

'They are still rumours. If they do turn out to be true, though, half the fleet will be racing each other to see who can get him first.' Rawlin said. 'If I'm reading between the lines of your report correctly, you're suggesting that the real prize of Ord Corban is hiding in plain sight, in front of their noses.'

'Special Orders One through Sixty-Five.' Lennart confirmed.

'Or with less drama, a chance to closely analyse, maybe duplicate the loyalty control and neuroengineering techniques that made however many Orders there actually are possible. That would be a very powerful tool in the hands of a renegade.'

'Even if all he intends is to blackmail his way to a higher position of authority, it's still a massive risk.' Lennart opined.

'The fleet was very enthusiastic with its bombardments in the Geonosian revolt. I wonder if that was why - to bury, vapourise, the details of what was done and how? In theory, you could find them in any veteran stormtrooper's head, but the number of people and facilities capable of reverse engineering that - low enough that they will all be very, very heavily watched.  
'I don't think there are any other clone versus human incidents that could provide as direct a path to the answers. You're right; this is the flashpoint.' Rawlin agreed.

'Even if I'm wrong-' Lennart began.

'There are still more than enough traces of rebel, criminal, renegade and possibly alien involvement to justify a deployment. One thing about your operations plan: the work up time. What do you expect the rebels to be doing during the period of grace you're giving them?' the admiral asked, and with good reason.

'They'll be executing either a panicked instant withdrawal, personnel only, or a covered, staged withdrawal removing as much of the machinery of the yards as they can. Third option, they do a Yavin, hole up and make a proper battle of it.  
'With the first option, we jump straight to dealing with the internal problems. Acceptable. Second option, we have a running fight with a lot of traces to follow and a trail to another base further down the line. Again, acceptable.  
'Third option: we've beaten them in loose, open engagements often enough so far that this is unusually probable. Fight a proper set-piece under cover of Ord Corban's defence net, beat back the Imperial strike force - us - and withdraw in good order. If I were whoever's in command of the rebels, assuming I still had any force to do it with I would opt for that.'

'You're physically detached from the sector group network, and there's bad blood between the sector Moff and the operation's political commander. If their intelligence is good enough to work that out, then I should rate it a near certainty.  
'If their subversion and destabilisation arms are good enough, you could be on course to be the first ship attacked by Imperial and Rebel forces simultaneously.' Admiral Rawlin said, joke masking serious warning.

'What, the rebels take advantage of our internal troubles to get Xeale and Adannan shooting at each other - if that happens, they're more likely to stand off and then try to take the survivors. How much support can I expect?' Lennart asked.

'Peltast and Daring are within easy reach, [/i]Speaker, Varangian[/i] and Tigress within five sectors. They can be there within three hours and within six respectively. The rest of the squadron, depends on existing commitments. Eleven days' warning and I believe only Aeneas and Venabulum would be unable to deploy. Can you justify giving them those eleven days?' Rawlin said, worried.

'If we moved now, with what's ready, it would be militarily more successful,' Lennart admitted. 'Sometimes I wish I really was the frothing madman I get made out to be, so I could do crazy things like that without worrying about it, but the political situation needs to play itself out further, so we can fight a battle that actually achieves something besides increasing our kill score.'

'The high-risk, high stakes option.' Rawlin said. 'Looked at that way, from you it makes perfect sense. You sound like you have enough trouble to be getting on with, so don't go looking for any more, d'you hear? Two private wars at once is sufficient.'

'Relax, Admiral. If I get this right, I should only have to deal with one at a time.' Lennart said.

'If you get it right and they get it wrong, you mean. Good luck - oh, and transfer this line down to engineering. Engineer-Constructor Captain Sholokhov wants several words with Commander Mirannon - starting with "deranged kleptomaniac pack-rat kitbasher", I believe.  
'It's either a reprimand or an invitation to Scrapyard Scramble. I can't disapprove of increasing your command's fighting potential, but do try not to give your Chief too many more excuses to rebuild bits of your ship.'

'Where are they?' Adannan growled.

"Don't look at me; you're the one with the extrasensory perception," Laurentia thought, decided against saying it. In his better moods, Adannan allowed her to speak her mind freely - behind the assumption that as he could read it clear anyway. She had nothing to lose by being blunt.

In a mood like this, deference was clearly her best option.

'My Lord, the ship has been substantially refitted on many occasions. Her deck plan has been altered. There is a higher than usual chance that they are simply lost,' she said, trying to sound properly sceptical.

'You don't believe that any more than I do.'

'After meeting some of the crew, I would consider virtually anything possible. If Igal and Reni were unfortunate enough to find someone prepared to give them directions, they could be anywhere from stem to gudgeon.'

'Star destroyers have neither of those things and you know it. This is not the time to be facetious,' Adannan reprimanded.

'My Lord, if you wish to understand how the crew of this ship think, facetiousness is absolutely essential,' Laurentia said. 'The only things they take seriously are those that go without saying - and if I may ask, what do you think happened to them?'

'Kidnapped and murdered, or tortured for information,' Adannan said, matter of fact.

'You sound as if you were expecting that,' she said. And he had let her wander off on her own, too. She was not given to questioning the tides of life that had brought her here, but moments like that made "why me?" seem reasonable.

'It was one of the possibilities I foresaw,' Adannan said, infuriatingly. 'They were expendable, in pursuit of the greater prize.'

She wasn't daft enough to ask if she was. The answer would be 'of course'. Anybody and everybody was, and he was not shy of risk himself - if he could see a benefit in it.

'Isn't that perilously close to a declaration of open war? At least, rebellion?' she asked.

'On whose behalf? We'll find them squashed into ooze at the bottom of a malfunctioning turbolift; carbonised, and not the cryonic version, by a power grid accident; atomised by heatsinks. Something evidence-destroying yet deniable. That's how I would do it.'

'My lord, obviously there is tension - a more than half renegade like Captain Lennart would be at odds with anyone - but would he go so far as kidnapping and murder?'

'If he is the man I took him for, if he is worthy of the Dark Side of the Force, then yes.'

'Are Igal and Reni no longer useful to you? What about Myfara?' Their pilot. 'She wasn't even expended; she was simply thrown away.'

'By what right,' he said, low menace in his voice, 'do you claim to know any part of my plans?'

'Practicality, my lord. It is more difficult than need be, to carry out my part in a plan I don't understand.' She took a chance asking that. 'You're not a spaceman, Lord, you need her simply as an interpreter.'

'You can nurse her back to health, if you want,' Adannan said, dismissively.

'Thank you, lord,' Laurentia said, inwardly groaning. This was not what she was good at.

'I expect Lennart to try to decipher my intentions. Such active, aggressive probing is a good sign. For the license it gives me in dealing with him, as much as the information it conveys. Now I need to feed him and lead him accordingly.'

'Lord, the watcher who reported him - she may not be objective. She may have been severely over-reporting his ability to learn the ways of the Force.'

'She?' Adannan said, intrigued.

'Yes, lord. A- a kinswoman of mine,' she said, hesitantly.

For a moment, Adannan wondered about the possibility of some sort of substitution. Either way. 'What does  
this clone do?'

'Jedi hunter. Part of a reinforced squad attached to legion HQ,' Laurentia said, tentatively.

'I can feel your fear,' Adannan said. 'You're afraid of me. Of what I can order you to do.'

'Yes- also, I don't understand. When are you going to start trying to teach Lennart the ways of the Force?'

'Once I have measured him. Once I know how he will try to use what powers I give him against me,' Adannan declared.

'I confess I could waste day after day trying to understand how he has recreated this ship in his own warped image. In his own way he is more of a threat than most of the Alliance; open enmity we can deal with, alternative methods of being on the side of the Empire less easily. I could try to frame him as a defector in place-' This was something that Laurentia understood; he was using her as a sounding board. Talking his ideas out. Lennart did the same, except he expected the people he was talking to to understand and participate.  
'- but that would require more political capital than I choose to expend, as yet.'

Right, she thought. Since when were you given to playing it cautiously? 'My lord, if I can suggest - you can't measure him from a distance. You need to be closer than that to probe him, get under his skin and find his vulnerabilities.  
'Also I don't think you can afford to take your eye off him. Leave him and his crew of maniacs alone for long enough and they will begin to conspire against you.'

'What,' he snapped, 'makes you think I am unaware of that?'

'The fact that you don't seem to be doing anything about it, Lord,' she said, diffidently.

'There is nothing they can find that matters more than their attempt to do so condemns them,' Adannan said. 'Don't you understand? All it took was a little melodrama, a touch of scenery-chewing, and I nudge them into a mode of thinking that provides me with all the evidence I could ever need against them, and some amusement besides.'

'It's still subtle, Lord. Very subtle.'

'Too subtle, you mean? If I give him enough rope to hang himself, he might manage to rig a trebuchet out of it?' Adannan smiled. 'Even if he could, he won't. You talk so glibly of a crew of maniacs - don't you understand what that means?'

'There's only a twist of fate in it between their being an Imperial and a Rebel crew. They are utterly, utterly nonconformist, Lord; that's what I understand by it,' Laurentia said.

'They've shocked you out of using your wits. I must meet your sister,' Adannan decided. 'Look at Lennart's file; to most people, a homicidal looney hanging on to his security clearance by his fingernails, good for the bloody work but not to be trusted in the sensitive details; he has successfully avoided postings to three fleet flagships and the Death Star through that. The fact that he is the chief madman in a crew of madmen - to me, that stinks of thwarted ambition. The big fish in the small pond, you see?'

'Are you saying that-'

'Of course I am. He's been playing the system all along. He is the chieftain of his own little circle here, his own pocket kingdom. He's done an excellent job of defending its borders, true, but now it is time for the wider galaxy to break in on him. We-'

'Lord Adannan. We have a problem.' It was the Givin. 'A holonet transmission was made from this ship - to the Executor.'

'Perhaps not as isolated as you thought, then,' Laurentia couldn't resist.

'Get him for me,' Adannan said, angry and scared. 'Get him for me at once.'

'Well. Lessons learnt?' Lennart asked his command team. This was the post-exercise analysis; Lennart had taken one of the formations in Caderath's computer - now about to rejoin the strike line as a fast pursuit element - with one bridge crew shift and a lot of computer assistance, his command team and second shift the Pursuit Squadron - average examples of the ships, they would individuate out the performances later.

It was scarcely believable that Caderath had been less than two weeks ago - no, even less than that. Tactical Rebel, strategic Imperial victory. Lennart had kept his ships closely grouped in hunting packs, picked off individual Imperial scouts, forced the heavier units of the squadron to divide in pursuit.

He whipsawed back and forth between threatening them and preying on trade routes, stinging tactical bombardments on poorly defended worlds - arrive, spray shot in the direction of bases and planetary shield generators before they could be raised, hopefully, leave-done damage and inflicted losses, but ultimately been hounded out of the operational area.

'Same old story. Same logic they used to justify the Death Star. You can't stamp out a rebellion that has nothing to defend. Give us a target we can strike at and they're toast.' Wathavrah said.

'There's a school of thought,' Lennart suggested, 'that suggests that's why we haven't bombarded Dac into vapour yet; we gain more by keeping them in one place and whittling away the calamari home fleet a tentacle at a time, than hammering them and making them scatter to the edges of the galaxy.  
'Which is a digression. This particular exercise?'

'Collective fighter operations,' Olleyri said. 'That and heavy use of hyperspace capable fighters. We need the TIEs in close, need the defensive screen against Rebel strike fighters. I reckon, operate in packs of small ships, use recon fighters to make up the difference.'

'The objective pursuit squadron is based on the idea of a fighter blanket; we scatter TIEs to do close inspections of an entire inner and mid system simultaneously, then jump in heavy ships to deal with whatever they find,' Brenn counterpointed.

'The first we know of a system's being rebel-held is when the recon fighters start getting jumped. Under competent command, they can punch enough holes in the sensor net to escape, then bounce the elements that move in for close inspection,' Olleyri pointed out.

'Thank you.' Lennart acknowledged. 'That's why I want as many hyperdrive fighters as possible - first response, cover the sublight dispersed screen. That's why the Venator, and specifically an older example. We may end up using Clone Wars craft with booster rings.'

'The maintenance nightmare that would involve, our readiness would plummet.' Brenn pointed out.

'True, and I'm already starting to worry about that ship's ability to project even standard fighter types. She seems to be in much poorer shape than I was expecting; my own damnfool fault for assuming Sector was following standard procedure and using the ship to train ground crew as well as pilots. Solutions?'

'How permanent is this arrangement? I was thinking of transfers.' Brenn suggested.

'Farm out some of our techies? We'd need to import some in return, and get them all back when we're done.' Olleyri said.

'We are overmanned.' Lennart pointed out. The Imperator class had been crewed on the assumption that post-War, natural born crews would be just as inefficient and indifferent to duty as prewar republic crews. The Clone War mainstay Venators ran on seventy-four hundred crew and half of them ground staff for the fighter complement, the Victory-class and their derivatives forty-eight to sixty-four hundred; clone crews, capable and disciplined. An Imperator manned as optimistically would run to only twenty thousand, six hundred crew; the designers had nearly doubled that so they could be sure of throwing enough people at the problems that some of them would stick.

One of the biggest challenges any captain faced was keeping them all busy. In that respect, Mirannon's 'improvements' were a distinct advantage. The Clone War era designs were arguably undermanned with modern crews, but that had its benefits, too; driving the crew to exhaustion was one way of keeping them out of trouble.

'Yes, I think the first ship we need to do that with will be Dynamic. Swap out enough of our own to form a working skeleton crew, take some of those from the Dynamic's crew who seem capable of improvement. Work on them from both ends.  
'Screen the crews on the sector group provided ships, too, look for ISB and political agents. Assuming we actually have anything from Voracious to screen - what was the latest on that situation?'

'The base commander managed to fiddle the orders enough to make it a volunteer-only operation,' Olleyri reported. 'That could actually be good for us, provided we can live with total chaos.'

There was a brief moment of silence, then everyone else, including the captain, said simultaneously 'Not a problem.'

They all laughed. 'Galactic Spirit help us if we ever get transferred back to normal jobs,' Lennart said. 'Tactical question; probing and reconnaissance of the objective, no, yes, if so how much?'

'From what we've been picking up,' Rythanor said, 'the rebels' relationship with sector group is one of armed standoff, no close ties. We have no evidence, really; they know that, at least.  
'This operation has to be of importance to them - is this overanalysis? I think this probably looks different a couple of levels up the Alliance chain of command. From the top, all right, we have a covert production and fleet support operation that depends, and so far has got away with, relying on political secrecy.  
'The local Alliance elements, even the region, know we're out for blood. They probably want to make a fight of it. They'll also be wanting regional and strategic reserve support, MC-80s or better. High Command may take the risk, but it'll turn into a sure thing if they know that they're blown, for instance if we run too many recon fighter overflights.'

'We can't count on their stupidity,' Brenn said.

'No, but we can give them every possible opportunity to exercise it. Local Alliance command will be calling for reinforcements; how do we get the maximum possible information out of Ord Corban without reinforcing their case?' Rythanor asked.

'The squadron includes two dedicated recon ships, the carrack Ungovernable - good name for a rebel, that - and the radical-variant Strike-class Blackwood. Also our own hyperwidget,' Lennart said. 'Long range passive on their part is the minimum position - we need some tactical data, after all. How much more?'

'Why do I sense another exercise coming on?' Brenn said, sounding tired.

The display table crackled to life. A man in a black hooded robe. 'Captain Lennart. Is this some bizarre plan to get rid of me, by driving my blood pressure through the ceiling?'

Wathavrah muttered something about him finally starting to fit in, Brenn about being able to come up with much more bizarre plans than that; Lennart ignored both of them.

'Remember the theory - we need to do this nearly properly? We recorded that conversation, and you may want to take a look at it before you make any decisions.'

Without waiting for permission, Lennart started the record of his call to Captain Firmus Piett of the Executor. Adannan's entourage and Lennart's bridge crew both watched it like a piece of cinema - a short, absurdist skit on military protocol maybe.

'I could have resorted to officialese, translated into civil service speak, but there was the terrible danger that he might actually have been able to make sense of it - are you all right?'

'My brain is still reeling from the concept of placing a prank call to the flagship of the Death Squadron,' Adannan said, with the stunned transparency of honest confusion. 'To take such an utterly ridiculous risk, and in such an utterly ridiculous way.'

'How else could it reasonably have been taken? Solo is the man who backshot Vader - Vader himself; there are standing orders to report any sighting or contact. Given the impossibility of doing so through normal channels, what else was left? Disobey the order, and I suspect enough of the ships we chose have residual loyalties to the sector group, enough to report us anyway, and that would look extremely bad, wouldn't it?' Lennart suggested.

'So you chose to do so in a way that could not possibly be taken seriously. An elegant, imaginative, and completely insane solution.'

'But nonetheless fit for purpose,' Lennart pointed out.

'You will clear it with me before you do anything like that again,' Adannan said, and dropped the connection.

'You let him off very lightly, Lord.' Laurentia said.

'I'm trying to decide whether he inhabits a parallel universe, or whether I do,' Adannan said. 'But you live in my world, understand?'

'Of course, Lord,' she said, voice carefully level. 'I repeat my point about it not being safe to take your eye off them, though.'

'Kidnapped and tortured for information? On the strength of that I'm more likely to get Igal and Reni back as qualified jet-unicycle riders.'

The turret crew had watched Aleph-3 prodding and probing the twi'lek; the injured female, she had more or less fixed up-injected the right drugs, she thought - and tried to push her from a state of shock into one of hypnotic suggestion.

Watched in varying states of queasiness. Jhareylia was one of the worst, but she forced herself to pay attention; a valuable lesson in Imperial field interrogation technique, she was telling herself. Aldrem held her as they both watched, fascinated and appalled.

Aleph-3 preferred to work without an audience, but needs must. Both were difficult - unnaturally difficult - to deal with. They struggled, physically and mentally - took skill to control, never mind extract from.

'This is not good,' she said, standing up. 'Let me take a look at that,' she said, pointing at the collar. Tarshkavik tossed it to her; she caught it, popped open the seals, started looking at the circuitry. 'Oh, this is bad. They are heavily conditioned, but it all resides in their heads. If I didn't know it wasn't legal, I'd suspect someone of playing with their neurology.'

'What has legality got to do with it?' Gendrik said. 'Last time I checked, slavery was illegal enough to be getting on with - what's another moral outrage or two?'

'Depends who it is you're driving to a state of rage, does it not?' she said. 'Can you contact the Captain without raising too much attention?'

'From here? I think,' Suluur said. 'Just got to route it so that it looks like it came from somewhere we're actually supposed to be.' He set about doing that.

'Captain Lennart? OB173.' She said, as soon the link was established. 'I, ah, captain…' she didn't want to talk to him in company, didn't want to have to explain. Nothing else for it. Never mind knowing no fear, there were times when knowing no shame was more important. 'I got involved in the, ah, special business,' she said, hoping no-one other than him was listening. Apart from the team listening over her shoulder. 'Can I speak freely?'

'Moment.' Lennart said, retreating to his day cabin, responding with a shrug to Brenn's raised eyebrow.

'What do you want to talk to me about, that diverges so drastically from your duty? So desperately unofficial?' Lennart said carefully, fencing with her.

'From you, Cap…Jorian, that's rich. You order your own men to kidnap two of the personal servants of an adept of the dark side, and you talk about officialdom and duty?' she said, letting the stress in her voice show.

'You sound almost as if you're about to lose the plot. Go on, dive in. I did years ago,' he said, trying both to deflect whatever she was about to say and to warn the turret team.

'I was asked to make a choice. Don't make me regret that.'

'What choice was that?' Lennart said, more aware than she was about how almost-hysterical she sounded.

'Between Adannan's side and yours.'

'Do you really think it's come down to that? He or I, and damn the Empire that we both serve?' Lennart asked, knowing perfectly well that it had but wondering how she had managed to work it out.

'No, Captain, I know it has. I have some evidence for you.'

'And quite a lot else to say, too. I may want to make this very, very public, and you have the secure line you wanted anyway - the gun team couldn't really be in this any deeper; you might as well say it out loud.'

'Captain, Adannan's slaves have been…more than just programmed, more than just beaten and abused into submission. Without full medical facilities I can't be very specific, but it is my professional opinion that their reaction spectra are so different from their species normal that their neural architecture must have been severely modified.'

'He sliced their brains.' Lennart said, sounding as if he was expecting it.

'You don't sound at all surprised,' she said, slightly indignant. 'Precognition at work?'

'Parallel investigation. You have the contacts for this part, though - can you find out what Adannan was, before he turned to the Force? As a Dark Jedi, presumably he does have a past, isn't a mad-monk blank slate.'

She weighed the difficulties involved. 'Yes. Can I ask what it is you expect to find?'

'Isn't it obvious by now? I expect to find that he was a doctor, or at least medical student.'

'That approaches common sense,' she said, calmly, wondering what sort of story, what kind of lies she would have to tell, to get access to the information.

'So I'm not yet fully clear of the charge of possessing uncommon senses?' he quipped.

'You never will be,' she half-shouted at him, strain showing. 'You can fight him any way you choose, but unless you actually bring him down with his own weapons, it will be from outside the charmed circle, and you will be under suspicion forever. You have to take up the use of the Force; then at least it will be within the circle, acceptable to his masters.'

'So you think you have me cornered at last?'

She opened her mouth to shout at him, realised how undisciplined it would look, decided on sweet reason. Even though she felt like grabbing Lennart and trying to shake some sense into him. 'It's hard to do that when I'm trying to stand behind you. Look, Captain, you may be in charge, but I'm the relevant specialist.  
'I know the theory of the Force, the laws written and unwritten concerning it, and the place of the Force within the Imperial power structure, a great deal better than you do. So why do you persist in avoiding letting me tell you about it?'

'You know, when you put it like that, I can see that you actually have a point,' Lennart said, somehow managing to push her even closer to the edge by being reasonable.

'Come up to the ready room. Oh, Port-4- the pair of kidnap victims. Can you dress their scars and injuries up-' it was a safe bet that they would have some- 'to look like a credible accident, and dump them on Medical?'

'Yes, Sir, I think we can manage that,' Suluur said. 'I though we were just going to shoot them and melt the bodies, though.'

'Don't worry, I'm not going soft, there's a reason.' Chiefly, it involved further playing with Adannan's head. 'One other thing. Aldrem, your team is now a security problem,' Lennart said, trying not to make that as sinister as it sounded.

'Sir?' Aldrem said, slowly and carefully.

'The situation works nicely. TDY. I'm sending you and your team to HIMS Dynamic as instructors - that ship barely shoots three point two. By transferring you to lick them into shape I solve two problems at once, that and getting you out of the immediate reach of the owner of those two twi'lek.  
'It also means, Galactic Spirit knows why, that I can take this opportunity to bump you up to Lieutenant.'

'Er, thank you, Sir. I think.' Aldrem said. He had pretty much given up on making officer; it meant actually having to obey the rules instead of pretending to do so, hanging out in the wardroom - he was by no means sure he wanted it, now that he actually came face to face with the prospect.

'Pack up and move fast, and while you're on Dynamic keep your mouths shut about the politics, except with Captain Dordd. That and start with the basics. I want that ship to have the same number of gun barrels when you're finished as when you start, clear?'

'Not entirely, Captain,' Jhareylia said. 'What about me?'

'Ah. Instruction assistant, that would be- we can fake that up too.' Which means I have to explain to the Exec what's going on. Kriff. 'Anything else?'

'A whole bunch of questions I don't think we want to actually ask, Captain.' Aldrem replied.

'I'm starting to wish I'd said that to begin with. Carry on, Lieutenant.'


	26. Chapter 26

The squadron was starting to come together now; almost all the ships assigned to it were in place. Fleet tenders had arrived to tow away the remnants of Kestrel and Penthesilea, said nothing about the bits missing; any attempt to slice through their computer systems would be made at the dockyard.

At least, any further attempts.

The only unit of major importance still to join the squadron was Voracious. Altyna Station was in a state of uproar. Vehrec had moved into the old Venator, taking up accommodation in the fighter control bridge tower, and started taking stock. The old ship had seen use during the Wars, dented and repaired a few times - minor incidents, nothing requiring major structural rebuild - but, as sometimes happened, the fighter complement she had had when she was retired to training duty was a very mixed bag.

Apparently for personnel rather than mechanical reasons, she had served her last active tour as a transport-carrier, ferrying replacement craft to front line units and damaged fighters back. The collection of odds and sods she had acquired was one of the main reasons she had been transferred to training duty, in fact; at best, black flag Aggressor work, nominally a wide range of experience. At worst, a wider range of ways to screw up.

The main initial flight and gunnery trainer was a twin-cockpit version of the TIE Bomber, with room in the removed ordnance space for four further trainees. Four squadrons of those: with enough ground staff, they could be reconverted to Bombers.  
Officially, nine squadrons of /ln. In fact, that was two squadrons adapted with wing hub missile racks as attack trainers, two squadrons of old TIE Starfighters - greyish-white hulled proto-/ln- converted to side by side twin seat, two squadrons of twin-seat /rc as electronics trainers, and three of standard /ln as combat manoeuvre trainers.  
One squadron of Interceptor variants, flight each of abortive /rc and /fc types based on the Interceptor rather than/ln hull, and a flight of the heavy zerstoerer-version with ten medium lasers- as many as could physically be bolted on, more than it could efficiently power or retain speed and agility with.

The relics: two squadrons of Aethersprites, removed from service and supposed to have been broken up - somehow they had simply been dumped in a storage chamber and forgotten about. Four squadrons of Actis and three of Nimbus, part of the original complement: all that was left of the original fifteen squadrons of each; most of them had been broken up to keep these flying. Superb craft, wonderfully sensitive, and fast almost past belief. Why had Kuat ever stopped making them?

Politics, he supposed. A shame; they could run rings round most of what was in service now.

Three squadrons of garrison types, one mixed PTB-625 and Y-wing, one squadron Z-95s and Y-wing, one squadron R-41 and Y-wing; they mainly did aggressor duty, and the ground crews had got used to dealing with them by now.  
Two squadrons of V-19 Torrent light fighter-bombers, aggressor, courier and, to be honest, joyrides. Two squadrons of early and one squadron of late-model Avengers, long range navigation and recon trainers, one of which was Vehrec's craft of choice.

The remainder of the fighter bays, and the deck space formerly allocated to the LAATs, was tenders, transports, tugs and targets.

As far as personnel went, things could be better. They could also be a whole lot worse. Numbers, good; he had been right about a lot of the crews of the defence squadron and a lot of the base personnel being bored enough to volunteer for combat.

Several of the commanding officers were reluctant to allow their men to go, but enough, especially the commanders of the two Dreadnaughts, were willing to put the Empire's good before their own. At least, that line had had a certain effect on them. One good thing: all the activity, all the slogans flying back and forth, it made it easier to spot who the agents were.  
There were a lot of them about; so many ISB personnel taking an interest, he could have formed a Wing out of them. Kidding, of course, but the thought was tempting. Use them as first shock element, get them all killed off.

Where, and under what circumstances, were cops ever popular? Especially political police, and that counted double for new political police out to establish their reputation. They had set out to be hated and feared. That and they were too often political in every sense - took sides in internal faction fights and used their powers of indictment and arrest for one side or the other. ISB Internal Affairs were a joke; they spent all their time on mole hunts, used that as an excuse not to look too closely at each other. The agents sticking their noses into this, most of them seemed to be rooting for the Moff.

Careful, Vehrec told himself, just because the moff's a prat doesn't mean the other side is right. Although it does make it distinctly more likely. One thing; the nominal captain of the ship had refused to volunteer. That meant the acting senior officer, and the man responsible for assigning the volunteers to crew stations, was Senior Lieutenant Ludovic Caliphant, who, largely as a result of his own time loosely associated with the intelligence services, shared Vehrec's hatred. When they worked out the pattern, which they probably would eventually - not all of them were complete sadistic morons - he was going to need to look for another job. Probably with the Rebel Alliance.

Until then, the routine deck-swabbing, venturi-polishing, fresher-cleaning dreckwork was oversubscribed. The problem was, there weren't that many unimportant jobs to be done on a ship as lean-manned as a Venator, with so many of her complement ground crew for the air wing.

Even if they got enough people, which they might, they were going to be seventy-four hundred separate individuals, not a single crew seventy-four hundred strong. They were severely short of petty officers, the professional glue that held any ship together, and of senior officers capable of serving as department and subdepartment heads.

The first thing they had to do was sort out what talent they did have, and pick out those competent enough to assess and train the rest. Caliphant was spending time doing that, functioning as a glorified recruitment consultant, when the tender emerged from hyperspace.

It was a military version of a civilian superheavy freighter; the normal bulk-load FSCVs could transport objects that could be broken down easily enough, parts and components and fuel cells, anything containerised, but for large single objects, they were less effective. The smaller tenders like the Sahallarehelped ships conduct underway replenishment and minor repairs; the larger ships like this one transported craft to and from shipyards. This one was transporting the remains of Penthesilea.

'Ouch.' Caliphant said, looking at the tangled mess. 'Considering most of the station can see that, how many more volunteers do you think we're likely to get?'

'Well, it was the unit we're supposed to be moving to join that was responsible for that. Pretty precise gun-work. Flight deck and engineering shot up, most of the rest intact.  
'It was supposed to be a trade - Sector weren't going to detach this ship unless they got something to replace her. I think we're about to get a wave of volunteers; all the techies who're otherwise about to be told to put that thing back together. That should do the engine room some good.'

By the end of the day, it had turned out to be so. The old ship had hundreds of problems posted, but they were all relatively minor ones: emergency lighting being blown out, four or five 'g' worth of compensator flutter in the troop bays, sticking doors, pinhole leaks, galley ranges shorting out.  
Gripes, not true operational deficiencies, accident-making perhaps and worth bitching about, but not enough to make men pause in the process of bringing their careers back from the dead. As a training carrier, she had been kept in serviceable condition: not spick and span, not like an active fleet unit, but fit for use. Which was the point.

Their biggest problem was still the people.

They divided into four categories; the old hands who knew what they were getting into, the Johnny-raws who still liked the sound of a fight, the bored and cafard-smitten, and the offloaded, people who had been 'encouraged' to volunteer in the traditional manner of military forces shedding their problem children on to a new unit, a habit which had probably started about half an hour after the invention of the regiment.

Some wit had reported disembodied voices in the plumbing; Vehrec suspected a practical joke being set up, and intended to keelhaul whoever was responsible. Lengthways.

The security types, of course, were lumped into category four. Command level was still the biggest problem. Vehrec was the highest ranking officer present; he wasn't line, knew enough to know he couldn't command the ship and do his own job as well. Caliphant was the senior ranking line officer. One of the Dreadnaughts had 'donated' their deputy gunnery officer, also a Senior Lieutenant but Caliphant - whose nickname seemed to be "Uckers" for some antiquarian reason - had more time in grade.  
That made him acting Chief Officer; it sounded like a merchant service title, but it was standard procedure for a warship under the control of another branch of service, in this case the Starfighter Corps.

That, and SenLt Garant Kirritaine would have to be physically restrained to stop him drooling over the Venator's main battery and planning to use it on everything in sight.

He was a living illustration of the shoe fetishist theory of economics; somebody with a particular kink towards something, like a shoe fetishist and shoes, would be prepared to pay more for that something, and accept longer hours and less pay to work with it, than a normal person.

Increased dedication was one way of putting it. "Rabid" and "Friendly fire hazard" were others. Better than indifference, Vehrec supposed – with fingers crossed behind his back - and they would find out how good a master gunlayer and gunnery tactician he actually was before long.

They didn't have a proper Chief Engineer; they had a committee. Half a dozen specialists, not one with the all round experience and clear seniority for the top job. That was a big potential source of dangerous mistakes right there.

Com/Scan, now there they were laughing. If there was one thing a training and testing range could be expected to be good at, it was com/scan work. If something did go catastrophically wrong in Engineering, they could scream for help really well. Although that probably was excessively pessimistic.

As for the fighters, they could man twelve squadrons; there were enough advanced trainees and instructors for that, and dilute those out to cadre a full complement if they had the pilot and flight officers for them. Not perfect, they needed a lot of working up, even more practise in working together, but they were more or less mobile, and ready to move.

'I don't suppose you could plot a move to jump stations that accidentally catches the commodore in our ion wake?' Vehrec asked, not meaning it - more than half, anyway.

'Afraid not. Collateral damage issues,' Caliphant reported, then got serious. 'We are ready to proceed.'

'Nervous? Relax. I saw ships in much worse condition than this still in use back in the Clone Wars,' Vehrec said, casually.

'Before or after, Group Captain? Helm, get us moving. Head for the nav buoy. Comms, signal Black Prince we're on our way.'

'Captain, I think I've found him,' It was Cormall. 'The individual responsible for the nose art?'

'Good. We have a line?'

'What's brown, and green, and purple and blue?' the unfamiliar voice came over the link. Cultured, educated, and quite nuts.

'An Ithorian on a rollercoaster.' Lennart answered. 'Who is this?'

'Doctor Nygma, Captain, at your disservice. Operations Oversight and Administration, Patrol Command.'

'Visual.' Lennart ordered, and got an identikit picture; a formal, stylish brimmed hat, apart from the electric green colour, over a blur of rapidly changing features, cycling through the range of human, near-human and alien possibilities.  
A quick search through his own console's image files, and he transmitted in return a portrait of the man the ship was named after - in full armour, touched up with the visor down.

'Well, I know which one of you you aren't, but which of me am I?'

'Oh, purely at random - that one.' Lennart said, freezing the image - on an absurdity with one Wroonian and one Mon Cal eye, a long Glymphid hose-nose, a Coynite crest just sticking out, an Ithorian neck, and an absurd little goatee beard.

'That's hideous. The face of a personality that's split dead against the grain. I'm sure I could come up with a much more subtly abnormal non-solution than that.'

'Surely, but when you depend on random chance, don't you have to take what you get?' Lennart said.

'Not if you believe in non-random chance.' Nygma said.

'Isn't that just the same thing as spectacularly incompetent predestination?' Lennart suggested. 'Either way, remind me never to play you at sabacc. Actually,' he added, realising, 'patterns-'

'Precisely. The quasi-random actually dependent on unrealised, hidden factors, the signals in the noise, the almost randomised- ah, the underlying nearly sense of it all. It almost drove me sane.'

'What a desperate fate that would be.' Lennart said, deciding to play along. 'Is that why you obtained permission for the corvettes to bear nicknames and artwork, to get the measure of the crews by seeing what they came up with?'

'Inexactly!' Nygma proclaimed, tone of voice hiding his precise word. 'How did you work that out?'

'Just thinking about how I would try to justify it. I wouldn't expect to be taken seriously, mind you.' Lennart said, his own tone making it a leading non-question.

'What a terrible, terrible hypothesis. Actually I've always wondered what a hyperthesis would be, haven't you? Anyway, what is there to be taken seriously except the mind, in all its signs and voices, spoor and stigmata? Especially when it's trying to leave no consistent trace at all. Was it for any specific reason that you decided to find me out?'

'Afraid so.' Lennart said, no longer feeling quite as confident about the answers he was likely to get. 'I'm interested in the sector fleet's patrol routines. A general overview, to begin with.'

'Over, squidgy underbelly, inside, round, through and down the rabbit hole? Very generic, very easy to approximately answer. Could you be more definitive, or shall I just deluge you with a shimmering rain of factoids?'

'What proportion of the sector's light and medium corvette strength is part of old style Patrol Squadrons, and what part of new pattern Light Squadrons tasked with patrol duty?' Lennart asked, deadpan.

'The sector's space soldiers seem to successfully slide from superannuated, superceded system to a schematic system sanguinely securing sanctuary for syndicated space salesmen. Supposedly.'

Lennart blinked. Brenn whispered to him, 'Sir, this is karmic retribution for what you did to Captain Piett.'

'You could have a point.' Lennart admitted. 'I think I might be better off with the rain of factoids.'

He turned back to the warped alien face on the monitor - now morphing itself into a smiley face with question marks for eyes - thought about it for a second and said, 'Apres that astonishing assault against my aural alertness, you mean that the patrol requirement's been scaled back to the bare minimum necessary to satisfy oversight, and the majority of the light squadrons are theoretically on escort duty?'

'Congratulations, captain. Most people start yelling at me and telling me to make sense about then. Yes, officially, the area is considered - well held.  
'I thought you may have endured a sufficient barrage of sibilants, no? Patrol consists mainly of clearing the flanks of convoy routes. Deep range scouting, inspecting potential sites for rebel activity, reduced to a pittance.  
Monitoring the aliens and the free traders, the strength is there, but the pattern, the shape - they're too concentrated. Formations to fight, not to find.  
'Once in a very great while, they catch something, and manufacture a mediatastic moron's mummery out of it- I'm doing it again. Down, Smiley. Bad smiley. No,' he added, apparently talking to himself.

'I can either translate in my head and perhaps get it wrong, ask you for a more prosaic explanation, or perhaps you could proceed in a way suited more closely to someone who is thinking mainly of what lies on the other side of the door?' Lennart suggested.

'Prosodie per prosequor par poetia proscriptus, indeed. Even, positively,' Nygma mangled the Galactic Standard almost gleefully.

'The exec's signed out all our protocol droids, hasn't he?' Lennart realised. 'Correct me if I'm right, Doctor, but you're working on the theory that anyone with no sense of humour, no flair for the absurd and ridiculous in life, is far too uncivilised to be trusted with the plain, unadorned facts.'

'Alas, it is only a theory. It would have required several more millennia of po-faced corruption and lies before it could be considered a fact in it's own right. It is also the most appalling heresy and deviation from Correct Thought. Exactly the sort of thing that the parakeets of pattern, those copying, cawing, noisy little lesser lights of the analytic, love to weave with.'

'Those would be the interminably spotted, white-breasted variety?' Lennart said, slightly emphasising the i, s, b. 'I'm not surprised that they plague you. I am surprised they haven't yet found an excuse to gnaw you down to bones.'

'Oh, they've found them, but they keep drifting away. You have to love people whose minds melt when they walk into a hall of mirrors.'

'Because no one else will? Because what they take so desperately seriously now may be next generation's bad joke, if we're lucky?' Lennart suggested. 'For all the mental exercise this is, I'm afraid we may have to resort to being serious ourselves at some point.'

'And quite right to be afraid, too. Can't you get at all of this anyway?'

'Yes, we can get the raw data. No, we don't have the long term perspective to draw strong conclusions from it. I'm going to have to pass those conclusions on to men of the meanest understanding, and possibly do a little weaving of my own with them, wherever the thread leads. You see we need the most robust, least elaborate version.'

'Which boils down to a polite way of saying keep it simple, stupid.' Nygma sighed. 'Why does no-one ever say "keep it complex?" It's discrimination in favour of the lowest common denominator, I tell you. Frontal lobes need exercise too.'

'On this deployment, we're in danger of becoming overtrained. Doctor?'

'Oh, all right. Although I really should throw a few more puzzles at you just to get your head limbered up properly.'

'I'd prefer it if you didn't. The data as well of course, but would it be right to say that your overall impression is that the sector group is being deliberately mismanaged?'

'More than that. The sector group is being allowed to be deliberately mismanaged. Now I like aliens; been one myself a few times, the things you can do with a properly managed fugue state - the different perspective, the foreign viewpoint always comes in handy. It is simply not procedure to let them sprawl.'

'Hmm.' Lennart thought about it. 'That would involve hounding someone on a procedural charge, an offence maybe or maybe not wrong in itself but surely wrong by law, and in doing so endorsing - parroting, in fact - the parakeets. Things would have to be very wrong for that to seem like a valid option, and I thought you said no more puzzles?'

'That wasn't really a puzzle, just a decision gate. About those aliens, though, they might be innocent...but there are a lot of pointers facing the other way. Just because you're paranoid?'

'Act leery enough for long enough, "they" usually decide to get you anyway,' Lennart pointed out.

'Ah, but if there's more than one of me, then they can only try it one at a time,' Nygma said.

'Are you claiming that you're a gestalt intelligence, or simply trying to become one?'

'Well, I am already unparalleledly parallel. So much so that I can pit my wits against the twits and prevail in a hail of…ah…my rhyme scheme's thrown a bearing, I must rebuild it with geometric logic. Back in a moment.' The image ducked off the screen. It came back as a- something, an unintelligent animal with wrinkly green-blue skin Lennart didn't recognise, and started morphing through a range of possibilities, again.

'No, have to go back to that one. Where/when were we? Ah, yes. Patrol routines. What do you make of this?' the creature on screen then, looked like a furry spider, sneezed out a starmap. The creature and the map both continued to morph, the creature - Lennart wisely decided to ignore it.

The map showed what seemed to be the evolution - devolution - of the sector's light force tasking. A red zone, brightness as patrol density, changing as the orders changed. A spastic amoeba; twitching and wriggling, throwing out pseudopods as the mood caught it, a surge here, a lance there. Generally, though, shrinking, contracting around the major worlds, around the trade route, thinning out beyond usefulness in the further reaches.

'So.' Lennart said, trying to make sense of it. 'Only the major worlds, and the trade route, get proper cover. Enough to prevent any incidents large enough to call their judgement into question. Enough to point at and say "look, we're well defended." Out there in the dark, though, any good they're doing is from sheer deterrence.'

'Worse than that.' The tempo of the display slowed, and the thin outer veil resolved itself - became first scintillating, then a series of threads. 'Total sortie count. Given that they manoeuvre in close company far more often than not, the picture becomes more like this.' Blob, blob. A few sudden surges of activity, hunting sweeps, splashes of red breaking up a black background.

'This amounts to proof of negligence. Barely satisfying the paper requirements, no more, and allowing who knows what to happen - who else knows about this?' And in whose interest? Lennart didn't add, yet.

'Who would I tell? I'm just a poor, cracked old sense-data snuffler, a meaning-miner with delusions of candour.'

'Indeed.' Lennart said, sceptically. 'How would you say the trend has developed over time?'

'Ah, now that is a leading question, isn't it? The how and the who come back into focus, do they not? Who has developed this trend?'

'Hmm. One would be a powerful pointer towards the other, wouldn't it?' Lennart suggested. 'I might even go so far as to use words like "indictment" and "bearing witness." Who would be in a position to?'

'You're in a better position to answer that than I am. I mean, any of the very small circle of humans and not so humans with the authority, they also have hordes of ruthless thugs prepared to execute their every whim. The word may be mightier than the fist in the long run, but the words I keep thinking of are "no, please, help, no, stop, go away, no, urgh."'

'Right. Send us as much raw data as you can and we'll take it from there. Personnel details, especially of anyone who's moved on and out, to a different sector fleet or to Region.  
'They might be able to add perspective, may be readier to talk. If my brain ever starts to rot from lack of use - Galactic Spirit hasten the day when it has the chance to - we may need to get in touch with you again.'

'Squirt underway. Don't worry, I've only encrypted it a little bit,' Nygma said; the image changed to a flood of text, orders and reports, in…some language or other. He disconnected before they could ask anything else.

'I sometimes play the fool,' Lennart said, sitting down, 'with the goal in mind of achieving the fool's freedom, to be able to criticise and pass judgement as if I was an outsider. I've just played straight man to a galactic-class wise fool. I probably should call him back and ask for lessons in applied lunacy.'

'I think you got one anyway, skipper, whether you wanted it or not,' Rythanor said. 'We'll start trying to make sense of the data.'

Black Prince had pulled in a shade over eight thousand live rebel prisoners, roughly two thousand of those seriously wounded by damage to the ship around them, or by a stormtrooper shooting for a limb rather than wasting a second switching to stun.

Most of those were in Medical, at least the ones too badly hurt to attempt to escape, but what to do with the rest? They needed to be put in a place where they couldn't escape from, learn about or damage the ship from, and didn't get in the way of the normal routine. Every Star Destroyer had detention cells, nominally a thousand on an Imperator, but Black Prince had taken advantage of the security facilities built in to convert most of hers to armoury space.

The remaining cells were being used to hold officers and sergeants of the rebel ground combat units; people who might successfully organise resistance. They were in solitary lockdown, monitored and under heavy guard. The bulk of them were in the most suitable space - the stormtroopers' quarters block.

Semi-isolated from the rest of the ship anyway, Mirannon had spared a work crew - grumbling bitterly about lost person hours - to complete that. The only way out for sixty-one hundred prisoners was through a solid bulkhead or through a legion of stormtroopers.

M'Lanth was escorted through the outer areas of the barrack block, allowed to see just what would bar his way - E-webs on every major passageway, generator fed T-21s on most of the minor, grenade launchers and flamers filling the gaps and the transverse passageways.

'So this is how the other half lives,' he said, as they entered the inner zone.

Not entirely what he was expecting; he had anticipated open barracks, no privacy at all. All on view, nothing to hide.

It was actually a row of 'coffins' - individual sleep tubes, against one wall, storage locker by each, opening onto a platoon common area. Canteen row at one end, freshers at the other, tables and racks in between.

For all the jokes about the re-braining process, Stormtroopers simply couldn't be that far removed from human; it was almost a relief to find that they might have personalities after all. They played dejarik and sabacc, at least, and apparently cheated if the fine fingernail marks on the back of the cards were anything to go by.

The rest of the rebels present, he did not recognise; different ships, and from all branches. Mostly officers, though. Thirty all told.

'What happened? How did you all…I got taken out in the preliminary fencing. I missed the rescue attempt. What went wrong?'

The senior ranking officer was a lieutenant-commander, systems control officer shields, from Penthesilea. 'Welcome to the birdcage. We were led into a trap, and suckered royally. Any idea what they're going to do with us?'

'Yes. I had it from an imperial pilot, who, hm, was in the sickbay with me. The spacers and grunts, five to ten years hard labour.'

'What, he's not going to shoot them outright? Poor man must be losing his wits, that almost counts as mercy. What about us?'

'The noncoms and petty officers - longer sentences. Ten to thirty years. Officers and politicals - shot and dumped into the biocycler tanks.'

'Kriff. I knew I should have stayed in bed. On the other hand, it simplifies things; what have we got to lose?'

'You're thinking about escape?'

'They shoot us later at their leisure, or we take a chance now, maybe still get shot, probably even, but do some damage and maybe win free.  
'We were played for fools, they lured us in and sucker-punched us, still don't know how, but I don't feel done fighting yet,' the systems officer said, belligerently; the rest of them nodded.

'I think they went out of their way to show me just what they have waiting for anyone who tries,' M'Lanth said. 'Platoon and squad support weapons covering the corridors, flamers everywhere. It's going to be ugly.'

'Uglier than getting recycled? Uglier than broken down into component chemicals? They're Imperial; what guarantee have you that they'll even bother to shoot you first, not just let you get solvented to death?' a junior lieutenant power tech whined.

'I know, let's all cut ourselves and let the wounds fester so we can give them blood poisoning from beyond the vat. I'll just go and crap on my stylus, shall I?' a young gunnery lieutenant said, angry. 'Escape is our only guarantee of anything.'

'Look, we've been kept in separate barrack blocks, but there can't be less than about five thousand of us. That's enough for a fighting chance.' The systems officer called them to order.

'To do what? Escape- or do as much damage as possible to this ship on the way out?' M'Lanth said. 'If we get to the bays, then what? We can't steal enough shuttles for six thousand men. Whoever does make it, the Imps' PD and fighters will try to chase them down. We need to cause chaos on board first.'

'You have a plan?' the systems control officer asked.

'Bare bones. Basically, we split into two teams - one to release as many of the rest of us as they can, the other to go after the guards and take them out, and steal their guns, then go and take more of them out with the guns - you get the idea. Punch a hole, a nice big hole.  
'Then we split again, two groups; one heads for the shuttle bay and tries to get out - into hyperspace if they can, down to the planet to hide if they can't - while the rest, whoever doesn't mind trying to die a hero, goes after gunnery and fighter control stations.  
'Their job, well our, would be just to buy time for the rest to get away, stop the Imps shooting or sending fighters. Probably get killed, but we're not all going to get out alive anyway, so why not?'

Captain of the Line Lennart was in the day cabin, essentially playing with the personnel records of the squadron, indulging in his favourite hobby of reading between the lines.

The advantage of holographic space is that you can shape it any way you like, customise it to your own ends, Lennart thought. He had the records laid out like an orchestra pit, little hovering head and shoulders official ID portraits, divided up by lines. The brass section, Strike Line. Himself and Dordd he knew too well to need to look up - although it was interesting to watch the process as actual events morphed themselves down to lines on paper. Little baby white lies growing up to be big and strong.

Commander Stannis Lycarin of the Perseverance was an interesting case; he was another retread, joined during the clone wars, served with the womb-born part of the fleet initially, got transferred over, rode an old Servator for a while as gunnery officer, command for a year, then got reassigned as a Jedi General's flag-lieutenant.

Switching from line to staff like that was usually a sign of someone who was being groomed for higher things. For the good of the service there should be a regular rotation for all, everybody agreed in theory but few bothered in practise.

That was an experience Lennart would have to quiz him about later, and see whether he had absorbed any of it. The most important thing he was still short of was line commanders.

After that, and apparently because of that, Lycarin was reassigned to a shoreside job, convoy planner and router for fleet support services. He had resigned just after the destruction of the last of the Confederate Remnants, become a security consultant. That was a murky business, and Lennart was more worried about the contacts he would have made in that trade than any association with the Jedi.

He had found his way back into the Starfleet about five years ago, evidently sponsored or at least accepted by someone with the clout to overlook his background - internal politics again - and had shifted backwards and forwards between staff and line. The pattern was the interesting part. He would crossreference that later to shifts in the sector fleet command structure, but it looked that as Lycarin rose in position himself, he was starting to turn on his patrons and bite the hand that fed him.

Twitches of conscience at last? Dormant sense of duty starting to reawaken? It was a generation later, about the right time for it. They would run through the start of the squadron exercise program, and then see what he had to say for himself, and about who his sponsors were and how his career had really ran.

The rest of the strike line consisted of two Fulgor, one their own capture; their commanders- Grey Princess's new skipper had the background of a functionary, a being who had ticked the right boxes and kissed the right behinds to get to where he was. What he was doing in command of a superfast pursuit frigate was anyone's guess.

The other ship, Provornyy, was under the command of a notable maniac, Commander Jiae Sarlatt. An ex-fighter pilot who had chosen to cross-badge rather than be promoted to a desk, and found himself responsible for something which could outrun ninety-eight percent of the Imperial fighter forces.

Lennart thought about what he could expect from them. Yeklendim, on the Grey Princess, he could trust to do the officially sanctioned right thing. Provided he could read through his notes from the academy fast enough to figure out what it was. Sarlatt, he could trust to find a fight, whether it was the right thing or not.

Fulgors were well shielded, but not well armed for their size; only four twin MTL on a five hundred and sixty metre long ship. They were bulky enough and could take enough punishment to win a stand up fight against most of their own class, but that wasn't the way to play it. Hit and run, fire and evade, that was what you were supposed to do. Lennart doubted whether either of them had the subtlety for that, but he would reach them what he could.

Woodwind section, the sweep line. Obdurate under Raesene, well enough manned. They had reacted quickly and intelligently in that business with the, probably, Falcon. They needed a bit more practise on environmental awareness, true.

Two Servators, classified as fleet destroyers in the old, small-scale days and heavy corvettes now; Eludor and Nefarious, enthusiastic but inexperienced captains.

Two Bayonet, three Marauder, six requisitioned Customs Corvettes - Lennart had high hopes of the customs corvettes; they were fast, possessed sound antifighter weaponry, and most importantly were working ships, routinely busy.

The biggest problem, of course, was Voracious. As individuals, many of her crew were capable enough, but as a crew? There were three time limits on their operations; firstly the purely mechanical, the eleven day estimate for rebuilding Comarre Meridian's bow. Second, the external political circumstances, what the rebels were up to. Third, internal politics, what the Moff decided he was going to do to avenge his humiliation and mutilation.

As far as training and working up went, Lennart was basing his operation plans on the mechanical time limit, and eleven days to form a crew was - before this, he would have laughed.

Imperial military regulations were realistic, in many respects - overly so in some; a bit more unreasonable optimism in the Starfighter Corps, assuming that they weren't disposable, might do more good.

In some respects they were politically inspired, which amongst other things had led to a bizarre turf war between the Regulatory branch and the Imperial Security Bureau over whose responsibility Correct Thought in the fleet was, that Lennart had slipped through the cracks of more than once. In others they were politically paralysed, which made it dangerous to be an innovator, but that was mainly a ground force problem.

The one thing they were supposed to be was uniform. In theory, interchangeability extended all the way up the line, one ship was supposed to be the same as any other of its class, run to the same schedule, the same performance targets, achieving the same standards of service at the same price.

Lennart understood that as an impossible goal to be approached asymptotically, distance made towards it but never quite attained - insofar as it was desirable at all. In theory, these ships should be instantly ready to go, already flawlessly integrated and doctrinally synchronised, able to deploy at a moment's notice.

In practise, he had chosen a ship requiring eleven days' repairs - and it occurred to him that it would be excellent seasoning for some of the squadrons' engineering teams to rotate through the Comarre Meridian, to lessen the load on Black Prince's spanner-slingers into the bargain - to give him that much time to integrate and synchronise.

Actually, he decided, he needn't bother ordering that - if he could come up with that, Gethrim would be there long before him.

The preliminary minimum schedule he had drawn up had eight hours a day of additional training, four hours of ship exercises which were each captain's own responsibility but that they would report on, four hours of squadron exercises. Eighty-eight hours, when he would have welcomed as many days. Eighty left, now. They would have to look very closely at Voracious.

The first string section, Recon Line Alpha. Meridian, Demolisher, two Strike - one a minelayer variant - two Servator, three Carrack, two Bayonet, four Marauder.

The second thing he was seriously worried about. Barth-Elstrand had ran the situation fairly well up to a point, when he had underestimated Rebel resourcefulness and willingness to die for a cause. That had nearly cost him his ship. Under a different Squadron commander, he could have been court martialled and possibly executed for his stupidity.

Lennart wanted his services rather than his head, not because he wasn't concerned by the failure, but because he thought that a bitterly angry Elstrand, seeking to redeem himself and coached to build on what he had got right to avenge what he had got wrong, could do well.

The second string section, Recon Beta, a mirror image apart from a recon variant Strike cruiser in place of a minelayer. The third thing he was seriously worried about. Was Falldess qualified for line command? If she wasn't, who was? There was an obvious answer to that, and a tempting one - but it wasn't necessarily honest. Falldess deserved a chance, but what would she make of it?

To get so far, to heavy frigate command with three strikes against her - from a backward world, the "wrong" sex, and already had one ship shot out from under her - she had to be good. Good enough to go further, or had she reached her peak with command of a large single ship? As a snap decision, he would say give her her chance.

Blackwood was an interesting experiment, the Strike variant. Visually very different, no curves at all, slabs and facets, and in performance just as strange - a shade over eight hundred 'g' faster and outgunning the existing versions sixteen to ten. The only things she seemed to give up were troop and fighter capacity- and factors of safety.

Her captain seemed far too good to be true. Conor Kovall, Raithal graduate in his late twenties and one of Lennart's ex-students in tactics. Looking at his record, Lennart found his stomach behaving strangely. Kriff, he thought, when I spouted all that about thinking sideways, misleading and misdirecting, and movement as a weapon in itself, I didn't expect to be taken this seriously.

The percussion section, the support he could expect from 851. Again, too familiar to need to check up on. To extend the metaphor, the didgeridoo, wabbleboard and mouth organ section would be their enemies in the Rebel Alliance - a cluster of blank portraits to be filled in later.

Behind them, and this was where the orchestra metaphor really started to break down, their theoretical allies in the Vineland Sector Group. Electric guitar and octaventral heebiephone? That sounded about right.

He was still sorting, deciding who he needed to investigate in depth, when he received a call from the medical complex.

'Captain, this is Surgeon-Lieutenant Bergeron, medical-general.' That was the part of the medical branch responsible for the routine needs of the crew, the general-practitioner work. Diet control, exercise scheduling, fitness monitoring, illness rather than injury.

'I have your numbers. The, ah, special numbers you asked for,' Bergeron continued.

'How?' Lennart asked. There had been no disruption to the ship's routine, nothing like testing the entire crew in rotation would cause.

'We have enough samples left over from scheduled fitness tests to run a count without disturbing anybody,' Bergeron said, avoiding the word 'midichlorian'.

'So who's about to come down with a terminal case of self-importance?' Lennart said, trying to ignore the sudden sinking feeling in his gut. 'Tell me, Doc, I can take it.'

'Captain, the numbers - the average count is between fifty and two hundred. They -'

'You might as well admit you're talking about midichlorians. Enough secrecy.'

'All right. Midichlorians are a symptom of the Force, not a cause. They are weakly correlated with several other factors, most of them to do with the nervous and immune systems. Everybody has some midichlorian count. Below fifty is a cause for concern - a pointer towards clumsiness and susceptibility to disease. Most people score between fifty and two hundred, as I said- median value is one hundred and eight.  
'Their significance is exponential - two hundred is four times as potent as one hundred. Phenomena begin to become significant, heightened awareness, sharper senses especially peripheral vision, faster preconscious processing - what I believe used to be referred to as 'Force sensitivity'- around a value estimated as six hundred fifty to seven hundred.  
'Serious biomedical deviation sets in at a level estimated as the suspiciously round number of one thousand. This is the point at which we refer to someone 'having the Force'. I suspect there is considerable variation based on a range of other, mainly psychological, factors.'

'Never mind the biomedical, it's the lifestyle deviation that I'm worried about,' Lennart said. 'Who?'

'There are two individuals on board with a midichlorian count over one thousand, four more with a count below that but over six hundred and fifty. Congratulations, Captain.'

'Kriff. I suppose it's too late to sue my parents. How bad is it?'

'Captain, this is a good thing. Even once you subtract religious nonsense and the obviously legendary, there is still a weak but positive correlation between midichlorian count and sense acuity, brain function and metabolic efficiency.'

'You're avoiding the issue, Lieutenant,' Lennart said, wishing he could.

'Sir, the high positives are Engineer-Commander Mirannon, three thousand seven hundred and forty-four; and yourself. Five thousand one hundred and twenty-six.  
'The lower range of positives are Squadron Leader Jandras, six hundred ninety-eight; Surgeon-Lieutenant Commander Blei-Korberkk, seven hundred sixty-five; Senior Chief Pellor Aldrem, eight hundred and seventy-seven; Stormtrooper OB173, nine hundred and eighty-two.'

'What do you suggest we do, form a support group?' Lennart suggested sarcastically. 'I can tell you right now that Commander Mirannon's reaction is going to be "Kriff, I don't have time for this, how do I get rid of them?" followed by some really complex experiments in applied radiation.  
'I suppose I should use some sort of Jedi mind power on you now, but I'll just have to make it an order instead; scramble them. Wipe the names, randomise the service numbers, disassociate the secondary data. Everybody's. Then-' and the next move in the sequence of events would be Adannan realising he had been fed data salad, reacting badly and going to Medical to wring out someone's head.

'Belay that. Don't bother. Just file it under patient confidentiality and leave it with me, I suppose Blei-Korberkk already knows, I'll notify everyone else involved. Out.'

Lennart leaned back in his chair, feet up, looked at the deckhead. He hated the idea. Had done for more than twenty years.

Two contradictory gut reactions; the first was that it was cheating.

Being in touch with some sort of cosmic energy field that let you outreact blaster bolts, walk on molten lava, fall hundreds of metres without injury, play with people's minds like putty - it was a vitiation of all the real physical and mental effort that normal people expended on their lives. That he had.

Not that he was averse to taking any chance that offered, any advantage that could be had, but, all arrogance aside, he thought, not quite meaning it, I am a damn good warship commander, and I like the notion of a level playing field, not because of any abstract commitment to fairness, but because then I can measure just how far ahead of my colleagues and rivals I am.  
If we are all playing by the same set of rules, then one man's superiority over the next is a matter of skill and judgement, qualities I have spent so much blood and sweat to acquire. So hooray for the even chance, or at least as even as evolution rather than magic can make it.

To find out that one has been, inadvertently, playing to a different set of rules all along, devalues all that was done.

The other gut reaction was that perhaps the Jedi had come close to paying a fair price for their abilities, in their dissociation from and abandonment of normal life. Contradictory, but instinctive responses didn't have to make sense.

It was a price he absolutely didn't want to pay. The Jedi - what had he described them as? Hyperzombies? Overpowered divorcees from normality. Fatally out of touch.

And for their failures, for allowing the Galaxy to slide into the Clone Wars, perhaps extinction was fair return. The alternative to the Jedi, however, how well did they compare?

Had not Dooku, count Serenno, been among their number? A renegade Jedi, who had relearned the habits of the station he had been born to, who had probably always been allowed to get away with a little more than most- even if they were unbribable per se, the aura of his family's power and influence would have earned him goodwill.

The enemy of the Republic, and probably that of the Empire had he lived. Other notable non-Jedi wielders of the Force, non-adherents to the Code - you had to go back to the Light and Darkness War that had preceded the Ruusan Reformation to find much about them. What that said of them was not good.

Most of the histories were written by Jedi, and therefore classified - or by the footsoldiers of either side, therefore partial.  
Lennart could not dismiss them on that account, but he did not look forward to the prospect of leafing through several million descriptions of mud and sore feet to find the parts that mattered to him right now.

Possibly time, he decided, to spend some of the ship's operating budget on more protocol droids.

It had largely been a ground war; what naval operations there had been were largely assault landings and raids, and had been conducted by professionals on both sides, revealing relatively little of the personalities involved.

What it did was disturbing. The Dark Jedi had taken their enmity very seriously, and their darkness likewise - as if it was an inevitable polarisation, no other colours in the spectrum but black and white. They had been deliberately and self-consciously 'evil', and if they had missed any opportunity of proving it, it was solely due to being too wrapped up in the drama of their lives.

What was there about the Force, Lennart thought, that destroyed a man's ability to think clearly? Was it such an intensely personal thing, this open channel to the universe, that it eliminated middle ground and made all things very personal?

He sensed that he was about to find out. Perversely, he decided to refuse to listen to the feeling, and was going back over the Sector Group's more distinguished officers when the com terminal beeped.

He ignored that too. It beeped louder, and when it started to give him voice alert he pulled its plug out.

Fnord and damnation, he thought, realising; the Force is starting to get to me already. Sheepishly, he plugged it back in, realised it was probably Aleph-3, and went to meet her.

The rest of the command team were still there, looking with interest at the colour-shifting red/blue iridescent armoured stormtrooper who was maintaining a forceful and dignified silence.

'Gentlemen,' Lennart said, 'I am going to ask your indulgence to share some of my troubles with you, and a partial explanation of how the situation managed to get this bad.' Aleph-3 glared at him as if her look could melt his skull. Come to think of it, someone with the Force probably could. He smiled back at her and said 'Could you start by explaining your own part?'

'Captain, I had wanted to do this in private.' She snarled.

'We are, or at least as privately as I choose to. Who I choose to turn to for support is my problem, after all, is it not?'

She could have argued the point, but decided just to get on with it. The mistakes and the madness could be patched up later, the manner mattered less than doing this at all.  
'Officially, I am a scout. Deliberate misdesignation - we are manhunters, wherever possible Jedi hunters. A relic of the days of the Purge, when the clones were all there was to do the job. We also have the responsibility of detecting and referring for recruitment those with potential, who do not hold to the ways of the Jedi.'

'Hold on a moment. Non-Jedi force users? Didn't they try to overthrow the republic a thousand years ago?' Brenn asked.

'Captain, this is far too public,' Aleph-3 rounded on him. 'This is not a matter to be spoken of.' She said, half angry half pleading.

'Then you're going to have a stang difficult time telling me about it, aren't you?' Lennart said, mercilessly. 'Come on. It's not as if we are speaking of some sort of barbarian cabal, a secret criminal society too foul to speak its name, is it?'

She looked at him in bogglement. Which way was he going? Who was he trying to convince, and of what? 'That was the name their enemies gave them, certainly. Did you expect the Jedi, of all people, to be free of hypocrisy?' she said.  
'We,' she said addressing the rest of the command team, 'reported Captain Lennart as having Force potential. As being potentially able to wield great personal power, as potentially subject to Special Order Sixty-Six. That is the reason Adannan is here.'

There were angry mutterings over that.

'No, it isn't,' Lennart said. 'I'm certainly an en passant objective, but there is another target involved in this that he is making a play for, that if his superiors haven't put two and two together you may want to clue them in on.'

'What?' she said, guessing what he meant but knowing to play the part. 'Excuse me? None of this should be spoken of at all except behind closed doors - What is this for? What are you trying to achieve?'

'As far as I can see, nearly everyone who the Force curses - yes, I said curses - is warped by it into an ascetic or an animal. Some manage to boomerang backwards and forwards between the two.  
'Neither of those is me. I may have to do this because someone has to counter Adannan. Someone has to be able to nullify him, and I seem to have got the job.  
'I'm telling you all this,' he told his command team, 'because I do not want to be either isolate or iconoclast - although I would settle for impostor if I could get away with it for long enough. I am going to need your help to hold my head together.  
'I will not resign my commission. I am an officer in the Imperial Starfleet first and last, and I will drink no more of this poisoned chalice than I have to.'

Aleph-3 moved so little during that, no longer arguing or advising, face statue still, Lennart wondered if he had shocked her into catatonia. Actually, the situation was becoming so strange, so fast, she was seriously considering it as an option. Keel over, and let someone else deal with the problem. Couldn't do that, had to try.

'Captain Lennart, I have come up against people who would die for the sake of the legend, who threw their lives away for the sake of fanning a tiny spark, who would plunder and murder for the sake of the Force.  
'Also, you're not going to believe me unless I admit, with. Rejecting the Force-' which wasn't exactly what he had said, true- 'is not unknown, but it is institutionalisable.'

'What sort of institution?' Brenn asked.

'One with "join us or die" engraved over the door,' Lennart said. 'Which, as far as I'm concerned, says absolutely everything there is to say about how much fun this is likely to be.' He looked at Aleph-3, waiting for her to contradict him.

'A high proportion of the Imperial ruling class - far higher than would ever publicly say so - believe the Force to be real and powerful. The Jedi Order was never fully accounted for, now appears to be trying to drag itself out of its grave with the help of the Alliance, and new potential emerges at the same rate it always did. "Join us or die" is not an unrealistic take on the situation,' she said.

'Are we talking about some sort of variation on the Invisible War, here?' Rythanor asked. 'Spies and counterspies?'

'As invisible as lightsabres, force lightning and telekinetic blasts get, but yes, that is a very good summary., Aleph-3 admitted, silently thanking him for steering just close enough to the truth that she could slingshot round it to a more acceptable conclusion.

'And, unfortunately, a fluke of heritage has landed me in the middle of it,' Lennart said. 'You can draw up your own conspiracy theories about what's been happening behind the scenes these last thousand years. Maybe we could turn it into some kind of writing contest, help pass the time-' the idea that they were going to have any spare time got a nervous laugh- 'but any theories about the last thirty, keep them to yourselves - for your own safety.'

'Not in the middle, Captain. On one specific and particular side. There is no middle ground,' Aleph-3 cautioned, sternly.

'Then perhaps it's time someone invented one,' Lennart said, and turned to the command team. 'Our professional job hasn't gone away, but I do need to ask you to do as much of it as you can. As I do try to explore this, I may change, become excessively cranky.  
'Part of that will undoubtedly be due to lack of sleep, but one of the worst effects of the Force as I read of it is that it either chills your temper to nothing, or fans it to a raving inferno. No prizes for guessing which way Adannan went.' A grunt from Brenn, a nervous giggle from Wathavrah.

'Gentlemen, I'm cracking bad jokes to keep my own spirits up. The prospect of what this could do to me terrifies me.'

'Don't worry, skipper.' Wathavrah said. 'We'll stand by you.'

'Tell me that again in a month's time and I'll be a happier man,' Lennart said. 'Start of third watch, we have an internal exercise - convoy duty. First watch - midnight to 4 am, and why not? - we have a squadron level hunter/killer exercise, them chasing us. We may as well begin as we mean to go on. Thank you, and dismissed.'

They left, and Aleph-3 remained. When they were out of earshot she rounded on him and said, 'Have you any idea just how many separate precepts - of both sides of the Force - you've just violated? How many reasons you have given light - and dark - to turn on you?'

'Thereby going even further to convince me that "A pox on both your houses" is the only reasonable standpoint. Is there no polychromatic side of the force?' Lennart said.

'Nervous tension brings out the comedian in you, I see,' she said, changing her line of approach. 'It's not the Force; it's power that has no sense of humour. Being able to mock them is a poor defensive measure compared to reaching out for power of your own.'

'If there's one thing that convinces me not to trust you, it's how readily you can go from one mask to the next. I infuriate you to the point of wanting to bite my throat out, and you fume a little, remember the objective and slip on another face,' he said.

'What else do you expect from someone who was raised and trained to believe in herself as nothing, the objective as everything?' Aleph-3 said, hoping for a simple answer.

'Fewer masks,' Lennart said. 'You have outgrown your station, your duties have changed you; you've become almost as much of an oddball, a misfit, as anyone on this ship.'

'I am as loyal, and as capable within my ambit, as any of you. If there is comparison, I am certainly a better apple than you are a peelifruit, with a power you are having to be dragged kicking and screaming towards learning to use,' she snapped.

'A better apple than I am a peelifruit - how many of the Emperor's Whiteskulls do you think could have come up with that?' Lennart said. 'Speaking of objections to the Force, do you know exactly how close you come to it yourself?'

'If I was actually capable of it, I would never have made it out of the clone cylinder. Past that, I never asked because I'm not allowed to know. It would be forbidden - but agonisingly close, close enough sometimes to smell what my targets are going to do next. It doesn't work on you.'

'So close that I think it's only your own mental blocks that are preventing you from reaching for the Force yourself. Nine hundred and eighty-two.  
'The difference in use between that and a score less than two percent higher, it's less than the difference between a good and a bad mood. You have the potential. If you're prepared to break the mould and reach out for it.' Lennart dropped his bomb.

She genuinely lost her composure completely then, for the first time in her life. The universe yawned wide open around her and her intellect took wing and flew away, leaving a confused mass.

'But…but…that's impossible, it just isn't, there aren't any, certainly not accidental ones, they didn't make me like that, that makes no- how do you know?'

'I wondered that too, but it seems because of your special status, the regular medical services keep an additional watching brief on you, just in case. It is not a jest and it is not a lie, the number is reliable - it's working already. The Force is already starting to cause me to lose my sense of humour. What are you going to do?' He asked.

'I- I've never been asked that, not in my own proper person. I have a dozen masks who could cope with that with ease and grace - but this comes from within, from behind the mask. I've ambushed myself.'

'One of the reasons I do try to derive you nuts from time to time is the occasional glimpses I get of the real you, in the transitions between one mask and another,' he said, not quite lying.

'The real me barely has a face at all, Captain. A simple creature of duty, discipline, order, capable of pretence only because it is my duty to shield my comrades, to lie in a good cause. By the book, what I should do is turn myself in for termination. We're not allowed- but what does that mean I'm about to become?' she said, trying to put it together.

'Once you recover from the shock and start thinking clearly yourself, I'm sure you'll work it out, but this is my best guess: you've never shown up as a potential because you know you're not allowed; you're effectively suppressing your own talent.'

So have I been, probably, he added to himself, and it is her who wants me to join the dark side after all, a little manipulative poetic justice won't go astray.

'What you need is someone to help you stop suppressing and put that energy and self-control to pushing the other way. To look for things you can do - when we are down to this fundamental a level anything I say is going to sound insultingly elementary, but that's it.' Now to see if she took the bait.

'If I can, the power would be it's own justification and I would be safe - but you?'

'No-one else, is there?' he said, gently. Believably. Don't overdo it, he cautioned himself. 'One thing. I'll only be a couple of days ahead of you, and scrambling to do other things as well, so no doctrinaire solutions, all right? Quick, dirty, for a specific purpose, however it comes, and leaving a trail behind me for you to follow.'

'This is such a fantastically deviant solution, I hardly know what to say,' she said, baffled, half-stunned by hope and fear both.

'It's a lot better than the book solution,' Lennart advised.

'It does have the merit of leaving me less dead,' she said, smiling at him and telling the part of her that was screaming in horror to shut up.

There was a loud alarm beep from the room's com console. Lennart went over to it. 'What is it?'

'Jailbreak, Captain. The Rebels are trying to get out of the complex.' Junior-navigator officer on deck.

'I'll be right there,' Lennart said, shut it off and said to Aleph-3, 'You had better rejoin your team; they'll probably need you. Try not to get killed.'

'Here,' she said, throwing the unlit red-bladed sabre at him. 'Try not to cut your feet off.'

He left for the bridge, she for the fighting.

Half way to the first rally point, she realised; whatever the truth was - and she wanted it to be true so badly - he had got her to promise him to give him a free hand in exchange for supporting her in her attempts to learn the Force herself.

Tear down from within everything she had been taught, she thought then squashed it. Had she not, in effect, just been blackmailed into standing by and saying nothing while he explored the Light Side of the Force?

She leaned against the bulkhead and laughed and laughed. The sneaky, devious, twisted bastard - of all the crazy-rational sideways logic, this had to take the prize. It wouldn't be that much of a problem in the long run; if methodology had anything at all to do with it, he would realise he belonged on the Dark Side yet.

As she neared the rally point, she heard raised voices. Adannan.

'You are giving ground. This will not do. You must press in on them and destroy them.' He was yelling.

'I'm shaping the battlefield,' QAG-111's voice replied, as firmly as it dared. 'What I must do is find the leaders and put them down, then herd the rest of them back into their cells, which are my troopers' barrack blocks the rest of the time, neatly and efficiently. I do not intend to be panicked by a bunch of unarmed chancers into staging a maximum collateral damage clusterkriff.'

'Smile when you say that.' Adannan glared at him. 'If you won't do this properly, I will.'


	27. Chapter 27

A blast door opened and closed; best avoid the whole business, she thought. Especially Adannan. On internal squad net, 'Aleph-3 to Aleph-One: location and instructions?'

'Corridor 82-J37A, rejoin.'

Because of the possibility of capture of helmets, the tacnet at every level was filled with short, staccato fragments of code. The situation seemed to be that the Rebels were trying to break each other out and were at least initially willing to take catastrophic losses to take out guard troopers and steal their guns. So far, the troopers had lost less than a squad, the Rebels over a hundred blasted, grenaded and flamed - but Adannan was right. They had given ground to preserve their line, keep lateral communications not so much to prevent casualties as to prevent any weapons falling into the rebels' hands. They were holding the armoury block and a line of communication to it, and that was where the rebels were gathering.

There would be one good fight there, with most of the boarding specialist battalion holding the armory as anvil and the rest swinging in around it as hammer, and roll them back from there. A clean crisp plan, one sound military act.

Provided the Rebels did nothing outrageously brilliant, and nobody on the Imperial side did anything outrageously silly. Such as Adannan barging in like a loose rancor.

His entourage were following him as he shoved past the stormtroopers into the barrack block.

'I said it was going to be a bloody business,' M'Lanth was saying. He had less hair and more burnt tissue than he used to, but he didn't expect to live long enough for it to matter. He and four others had charged down a flamer-using stormie; he had survived because the others had caught the worst of it.

'There's a batallion of them or more, we have five working rifles, a flamethrower, and four sidearms, and the white hats know all about blaster powerpack bombs. How are we doing with the doors?'

'Not good,' one of the pilots from the Penthesilea said; he had one jacket sleeve pinned up. 'First, you have to catch a mouse droid, dismember and rig a code cracker out of the bits. After the first time we did that the rest of them started running. It's taking us ten minutes to crack each cell.'

'So we would be better off using what guns we do have to shoot locks off and the like,' M'Lanth suggested.

'Once we get them out, where do they go?' his opposite number said. 'We need an escape route. The air vents are grilled off, we even tried the sewer line.'

'What happened?' M'Lanth asked.

'Osmotic filter. Guy who touched it, the flesh started melting off his hand.'

'You'd think they'd have put a dianoga down there, if only for tradition's sake. Do you think we could- no. Even if we could unscrew it and use it, throw it over a stormie like a net, it wouldn't get through their armour.' M'Lanth thought about it. 'Power lines, no. Obviously not. Have they left nothing behind?'

'Nothing with energy in, when they moved out they cleared out. None of the cubbyholes, hides, nothing like that.'

'Souvenirs, spares, rainy day hideaways, typical barrack room crud - everything, everywhere?'

'They were thorough. Took most of their kit, barely left a-' Both of them realised, and said at the same time, 'holochess console.'

'Do you think we can do anything meaningful with incoherent light?' M'Lanth said, grinning. 'Illusion, failing that a flare?'

'I'll do that, and you work on plan B.'

'B? I think we're going to need D through Q,' M'Lanth admitted. 'Whiteheads aren't as dumb as they're supposed to be.'

'Let's hope we get as far as X and Y.' one pilot said to the other.

'First, Second and Third Furniture Attack Squads ready, squadron leader,' the petty officer that reported to M'Lanth said.

'Right.' M'Lanth addressed the cluster of volunteers. 'Doublethink aside, we'll be going down three parallel corridors, each squad pushes a mobile barricade, throws as much crap as it can at them from behind it.  
'We're probably all going to get killed, but I want to loosen their line, push them back, hit them from the sides, maybe get to one of the armoury blocks. Riflemen, shoot the squad support gunners first.  
'This is basically a human wave; we all know how stupid an idea that is but we haven't got anything better. Let's go.'

The barricades were mounds of junk. There was little else they could be in the time and with the parts, so it would have to do. Lockers, benches, mattresses, tables, cooking gear - pots and pans and worktable surfaces, ripped out appliances: name it, it was there.

All three lines of attack and three others would be covered by flares from holo-gear, exploding flamer canisters or both; the three others just to create a little confusion.

What was he supposed to say at a moment like this, M'Lanth wondered. Isn't "who wants to live forever" traditional? Personally, I would settle for, oh, fifty years longer than the other guy. Chance would be a fine thing. 'Go.'

What he expected was to be huddling behind and shooting wildly over a barricade of junk that was disintegrating and being torn apart by a red rain of blaster bolts, shoving it forward and throwing back burning bits, and probably getting blown up.

There were the sounds and flashes of that happening, but not to them.

As they pushed forward in a yelling, groaning charge, the stray thought came to him that there were very few people throughout history who had ever gone into combat armed and armoured with a dishwasher. Unfortunately, up to the point where they hit the cross-corridor, it seemed to be working.

'Oh, no, no, no. This is not what I intended to happen,' Adannan said, as if he was berating the universe for not following his orders. He could sense it start to go wrong. 'Don't they trust me?'

'My Lord,' Laurentia answered, 'would you? The Legion reorganised their line to come out to escort us.'

'Somehow, the rebels fluked their way into striking at an unprotected corridor in mid-shuffle. The only, faint, impossible chance they have and it lands right in their laps. The universe is the wrong shape.' He screamed the last part, Force lightning dancing around one hand. Somebody would be hurt for this.

M'Lanth couldn't quite believe it; the squad they had been about to charge head on into had moved. T-junction - to his left the backs of the squad moving to take up a new position, starting to turn to face, to his right the replacements moving in.

'You lot that way, you lot this way, go.' Half to charge each group.

At point blank, close quarters, the stormtroopers had no line of shot that didn't include one of their own. Last ditch procedure would be one squad opening up with everything it had, accepting the friendly for the sake of the enemy casualties - and the junior squad leader called for that, but there were too many rebels.

Only two shots came from the rebels; one miss, one straight through the head of the T-21 gunner. One flechette volley turned half the rebel leaders into red sludge, a crackle of individual shots dropping most of the rebel front line, but there were more behind.

One blaster shot hit a rebel who was using a gelfoam mattress as cover; getting that to burn was quite a feat, but it did. The rebel soldier collapsed, the man behind him picked up the burning mat and threw it at the flechette gunner; it draped itself over the stormtrooper's head and shoulders, blinding him.

Immediate action drill, take the helmet off, ignore the smell and keep firing; he did, but before he could shoot a broken slab of table hit him in the head, knocking him down and out.

Then it was fists and feet, rifle butts and improvised weapons at point blank. Flashes of the action: M'Lanth faking going for the T-21, a stormtrooper about to shoot him in the kidneys suddenly having his feet swept out from under him and his head bounced off the deck;  
One of the stormtroopers using the butt of his carbine to parry a wok aside, swinging the gun round for a zero-centimetre range shot, what was left of the rebel collapsing against him and pulling him down, where he was stabbed through the neck with a shard of deck plating;  
The squad sargeant killing a rebel with a buttstroke to the side of the temple, grabbing the reb's cooking knife and gutting another with it, four of them grabbing him and dragging him down, one trying to beat him to death with a footlocker.

At even odds, the stormtroopers would have taken it easily. At ten to one odds, they could have killed enough of the rebels fast enough that the rest would have broken and ran.

Being outnumbered thirty to one by do or die fanatics was too much. They went down fighting, but they went down.

The Imperial plan was swiftly revised and updated; the rest of the battalion started to fold itself in around them, englobe, lay down fire and destroy. As per the rebel plan, they picked up what weapons they could and headed for the main armoury block.

Adannan thought he had it. Had identified the man he was after, the spiritual leader of this little uprising. Time to have some fun.

Team Omega-17-Blue happened to be stalking the same target.

'It hasn't occurred to him that if he and his soft-skinned team weren't there, we could gas the rebels,' Aleph-1 said. 'We wouldn't even need to make pizza. He hasn't done anything particularly renegade yet, so we can't catch him in the crossfire.'

'You know about that?' Aleph-3 asked her leader.

'Of course. Do you think I hadn't considered the possibility? Never mind that you get the shakes whenever the Captain comes into sight.'

'I thought I hid it better than that,' she said, avoiding the personal in favour of the professional.

'We've been working together for thirteen years. No chance. There is this; Adannan will want to interview you. Whatever you hide, given a clear mind he'll figure it out. Confront him now. Stage- manage at least the first impression.'

'Right. Never mind the rebels in the way,' she said, raising her DC-15 long rifle.

'Consider them a fringe benefit.'

In their primary role, they carried all sorts of odd and distinctive devices, with a heavy emphasis on close quarters; flechette and flamer, arc blasters, riot guns, scatter and auto-blasters, grenade launchers and a whole library of projectile weapons.

In the open field with the rest of the legion, they functioned as a group of sniper pairs, spotter and shooter.

Perversely, Aleph-3 liked the old heavy rifle as a close quarters weapon, precisely because it was a clumsy beast that required a lot of positive control - it was impossible to be casual or careless with. It was long and rugged enough to use as a quarterstaff if they got really close, and powerful enough to shoot through walls if necessary.

Or blow pieces off them. The first batch of rebels they encountered looked like they were trying to break open a barrack block door by hitting it with a mouse droid. Only four of them.

All of them took at least two shots at first instance and another two before what was left hit the ground. Not overkill as much as warmup. The rebels had no perimeter or flank security, mainly because they had nothing to do about it if it did happen.

There was a scatter, in many cases a splatter, of Rebel wounded and dead; the incapable would be rounded up, the still dangerous were neutralised - stunshot or buttstroked - in passing.

A three horse race, then, between an Alliance fighter pilot, a Dark Jedi in the process of throwing caution to the wind and a team of Jedi-hunters on the verge of considering him fair game.

M'Lanth knew he was out of time; it had become a fight rather than an escape, and possibly not even that, perhaps an act of sabotage was the most to be had. He and the survivors of the assault party were fighting a very literal running battle, with the disadvantage that the enemy knew exactly where they were going.

The armoury block extended several levels. No sense doing the obvious. Up? Unfeasible. Down?

Lift the deck plates, avoid the pipe ducts that were covered by the ship's tensor field and their guns would do nothing to, wriggle down to the deck below; four stormtroopers on guard, a half squad, called the alarm and opened fire.

M'Lanth flattened himself on the deck as he hit, one of the stormtroopers just a little too slow tracking him shot him in the buttock as he lay prone; adrenalin kept him moving long enough to fire two shots at the flamer trooper.

Calling them flamers was an anachronism; it was a thermal plasma weapon, to all intents and purposes - a very, very hot steam gun.

The stormtrooper dropped, shot in the arm, but not before he had burned the next three rebels down from the deckhead. Their charcoaled remains tumbled down on the rebel pilot, and he collapsed into unconsciousness.

The rest hurled themselves at the stormtroopers, clambering over their own dead to do so; the armoury door was right there at the end of the corridor. There were fewer of them left, now. Less than half those who had been let out of their cells, but they had reached their first goal.

No time to faff about with security codes; plant blaster powerpack bombs on the lock and hinges and stand back.

Not far enough; the blast killed one of their own and scarred others, but it worked - the door slowly toppled outwards. They charged in and were totally baffled.

The first thing they saw in front of them was a mess of plating, spars and a squared off cylinder that probably was some kind of generator. The only obvious weapon was barbette mounted and fifteen metres long.

There was a label on the wall above; AT-AT to AT-HE conversion kit. Another three of those along the opposite wall; on the same wall, four sets of seats and speeder bike garage facilities, AT-HE to AT-AT conversion kits.

The rebels looked at them, desperately scanning for something, anything useful; short of firing up the generator, connecting it up and trying to traverse the gunship-walker's heavy laser, nothing.

The flamer trooper was still alive, and he laughed at them. 'You dozy kriffwits, what do you think 'armoured legion' means? We're mostly vehicles, what were you expecting?'

They shot him again; he slumped. They were still ransacking the armoury block with its near nothing of use when the lights flickered out - telekinetically smashed - and were replaced by a single bar of red light in the corridor.

Most of the rebels still outside the armoury, forming some kind of defence line, started shooting; Adannan laughed at them, intercepted the bolts, looking effortlessly at ease doing it. Bounced most of them back, hit a couple of the rebels - then, just because he could, found the only heavy weapon they had, a squad T-21, and blasted the operator to abstract carbon sculpture with force lightning.

'Where is he?' Adannan bellowed at the rebels. 'Where is your leader?' No answer.

He charged forwards into the middle of them, sliced a blaster rifle in half, let a punch slam into him, took it like it was nothing, with an open palm strike pushed the attacker's heart out of the back of his chest. He gutted one man with the sabre, felt a hand grab his wrist, another seize the sabre hilt; sent two bolts of black light flying out, blasted the life out of both men, instantly withering them to the look of year-old corpses. An interesting power; he must try it on another Force user sometime. In fact he planned to.  
He wrested the sabre free, flashed a man's head off, leapt back out of the way of another two trying to grab him and drag him down, looked around for a worthy target.

M'Lanth had barely recovered consciousness; he was seriously hurt, hazy with pain and relying on adrenalin and endorphins to function even marginally. But he did have a flamethrower. The stormtrooper who had it before didn't need it any more, it was the first thing M'Lanth could find to hand and the only thing he could reach. He laid it on target and squeezed the trigger.

There were powers and techniques that could block a flamethrower blast; fastest and easiest way, kill the wielder. Too late for that. Telekinetic barrier was a trick he had never learned - and absorb and dissipate, well.

He called on the Force - demanded that it aid him - to absorb the heat in the plasma stream; but he had never been good at that, and it took nearly all of his concentration to hold it back, splash it away.

He advanced slowly towards the prone, charred and bleeding rebel, fighting his way upstream to the man he recognised as his chosen target; then suddenly felt a wide, hollow pain - of course. One of the other rebels had had the presence of mind to shoot him in the back. How silly of him not to have foreseen that.

Adannan's entourage had been, as usual, ordered to hold the ring while their master moved in, unwilling to accept help or share kills. They were too far away to help, but Omega-17-Blue had been following him, and assisting the boarding battalion by burning through any particularly stubborn knots of rebels.

They saw him collapse on to his knees, distracted badly enough by the wound that his clothes and hair started to burn under the thin, bright plasma stream leaking through his defences.

It was the curse of their nature, absolute obedience to orders, regardless of how politically or tactically insane they might be. The outer cordon around the armoury complex had known they were doing a suicidally stupid thing, moving out before they were properly relieved, but the old imperatives had kicked in.

Aleph-1 shot from the right inwards, Aleph-3 put one shot clean through M'lanth's heart, wishing she was allowed to shoot Adannan as neatly, then switched target to two rebels from the left inwards, sidestepping away from a return shot and nailing both. The rest of the team picked and shot for their targets, kept their heads, laid down fire. For all the guard and garrison duty they ended up pulling, it was not the stormtrooper corps' highest talent.

They were, arguably, not even particularly good at defensive warfare, tending to turn in solid, uninspired performances. Given half a chance to counterattack, though, they were in their element.

The rebels outside the armoury melted, dropped, blasted through, pieces blown off. Some tried to shelter behind their own dead; another thing the old heavy rifles were good for.

That done, two squads of the boarding battalion went in to retake and secure the armoury. Adannan was back on his feet, one hand over the wound, looking disgusted with himself.

Aleph-3 strode up to him, took off her helmet, tucked it under her arm and held out a hand. 'My lord, I believe you wanted to talk to me. Watcher 22173.'

He ignored her hand - it was a simple probing gesture anyway, fishing for how off balance he was. 'I wanted him alive.' He said, pointing - with the sabre, she swayed out of the way - at M'Lanth's dead body.

'No orders were given to that effect,' she said, as if it explained everything, playing slightly dumb. 'Standing orders categorise persons of your type as to be protected. It was him or you, my lord, I had no choice.'

'Do you shelter behind your standing orders often?'

Oh, kriff it, she thought. Maybe if I provoke him, he will attack me and what little sense of self preservation I have will kick in profoundly enough to overcome the imperatives and let me take him. Keep that in mind as plan - well, the rebels have used up most of the alphabet around here, plan Z.

'My lord, they proved little shelter to the troopers of the boarding batallion who were lured out of position by your presence. Your arrival in the combat zone proved to be a great asset to the rebels,' she said, sternly.

'How dare you criticise me,' he shouted. 'I am an agent of the council, I am your lord and master, and if I choose to squander you by any means, deliberate or accidental, it is of no importance.'

What was that line Lennart kept quoting? "If you forget my rank, Sire, I will forget yours?" Saying that really would get her killed. 'That's in standing orders too, Lord,' she actually said.

'So you think that I am a dangerously amateurish fool, in love with his own power, and a hindrance and a hazard to the professionals?' he asked her, tone deceptively light.

'As far as infantry work goes, my lord, yes.'

'You're not supposed to have a backbone,' he said. Oh kriff, she thought, time to book an appointment with a cybersurgeon. 'The moral courage to tell your leader that he's being an idiot was never supposed to be part of the package. Where did you get it from?'

'Osmosis, my lord, from our targets. So many neophytes prepared to challenge the Empire with nothing more than an ancient religion and a shiny stick, in the face of their heroic stupidity how could we who have skill and experience show anything less?'

Adannan laughed, then winced slightly as the pain got to him. 'I stopped most of that. Not all, it seems. You are starting to sound almost as worthy of investigation as Captain Lennart is.'

'Set a deviant to catch a deviant, Lord? In any case we are all put through positive vetting on a continuing basis, and I would be surprised if there were not other checks on our loyalty and stability that we do not know of.'

'Which you are watching for little tells, accidental confirmation on my part,' Adannan said; she looked away. 'Does Lennart realise he has potential to be strong in the Force?' he changed subject suddenly.

She could think of lies to tell, but none that would withstand cross-examination. 'Yes, Lord. His willingness, however…'

'You have spoken with him about this?' Adannan said.

'My Lord, he does not want the Force. I have tried to do the groundwork, help persuade him.'

That was not desperately unusual in someone who could not have the Force, but in a sensitive, who could sense the potential of what they could do, it was almost pathological.

'How can he reject it? He knows what the penalty is for doing so?' Adannan asked.

'He knows, Lord, and although he speaks of being cursed by the Force, I believe he will bow to the inevitable - although he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards it, at first.' Which was more or less true.

'Hmm. The kicking and screaming, I can stimulate. Would he bow to pressure, if I threatened to start randomly disembowelling members of his crew? Accept your destiny or Spaceman G'Blort gets it?'

'If you wished him to turn to the wrong side of the Force then that is what you should do,' she said firmly. 'You would become his enemy pure and simple, and he would embrace the Light Side to use against you.'

'Really? And what would the rest of his crew do, in such circumstances?' Adannan asked.

He got a long pause in return.

'I find that hard to believe,' he said. 'Of course he has built up something of a personality cult, probably through the subconscious use of the Force, but powerful enough to lead his people into rebellion?'

'My Lord,' she said carefully, 'he himself does not think so, but I suspect he may be being too modest in that.'

'Hmm.' Adannan would have raised an eyebrow if he had any left. His minions arrived; the Givin had an arm in an improvised sling. Laurentia darted a look of total hatred and envy at Aleph-3 that was returned with calm contempt.

'Well,' he said to the hunter team, 'I'll leave you to the tidying up. I wouldn't want to get in your way.'

He draped one arm over Laurentia's shoulder, started to limp away with her propping him up.

'My lord,' Aleph-3 called after him. He turned back to her. 'You and Captain Lennart have more in common than you probably want to admit, in particular the sense of humour. Show him the dark side doesn't take that away and he will turn more willingly.'

He nodded, and limped away.

'Lord Alric, she's biased. Her judgement is seriously compromised, she's more than half in love with him,' Laurentia objected.

'She's a skilled liar, of course, but not so skilled that she can make herself believe that anything other than Lennart embracing his destiny in the dark side is even remotely feasible. If she does desire him, she'll be working towards that anyway,' Adannan said.

'It's not possible. I couldn't do that, and she's me. We're identical.' Laurentia protested.

'Time and experience have diverged you. You don't have the guts any more to call me a grandstanding idiot.'

Adannan's other aide tried not to laugh, Laurentia was indignant. 'She said that?'

'Yes. She was right, too,' Adannan winced. 'I went into that relying on intimidation to paralyse and cow the rest while I hacked them down one or two at a time. I didn't take the time to weigh them, realise how little they had left to lose. A fairly light price, for such a fundamental error,' he admitted. 'Have to do better next time.'

Black Prince's main ready room: most of the captains of the squadron were attending holographically, which Lennart thought was a shame - he would have liked to meet them in the flesh, smell them and see them fidget.

With the enhanced senses that the Force is known to bring, he thought, would I be able to pick up on all the little signals, the subliminal muscle-twitches that give a person's motives away? And if I could, would it be genuinely useful, or would drinking in the ugly details, all the private hates and fears, prove too much and make the detachment of taking a brown robe and going 'om' a lot seem a blessed relief?

How easy it must be to be a cynic, when you know for certain all the things that the Force can reveal to you.

Business first. 'From your point of view, that could have gone better. For the defender, what is the book solution?' he asked them.

'Pursue and destroy,' Lycarin said. 'The Operations Office demands it.' He was sitting bolt upright, millimetrically precise in uniform and deportment; he was on the carpet, and knew it.

'What the operations office claims ought to happen is less important than what can and does happen,' Dordd reproved him. They had had a frank exchange of views - or a blazing row in plain language - which had done nothing for the defenders' chances.

'I agree in principle,' Falldess spoke up. 'Take the fight to the enemy and destroy them.' She too was in cool, formal mode.

'It's easy to agree in principle,' Kovall said. 'Turning it into practise is the hard part.' He was caffeinated to the eyeballs and bouncing of his own com suite's ceiling, almost.

'As far as I can tell, none of you were working with a full enemy intentions analysis. Delvran?' Lennart asked.

'You got inside the curve. What I managed to assemble couldn't keep up with you,' Dordd admitted. He looked very tired, and Lennart wondered how far back that went.

'EIA is a staff level, non-combat task,' Yeklendim pointed out, correctly according to the manual.

'A man who manages to get himself killed as trivially as you did-' Kovall started to rate him. They were nominal equals in rank.

'I chose to do things this way largely to see if, and how well, you would work together,' Lennart pointed out. 'Consider the actual exercise plan: one individually powerful ship, with the mission of striking a target defended by a collectively superior group of ships. My objective is obvious.'

'Draw us out and loop round behind us?' Elstrand muttered, subdued, then repeated it more clearly.

'Draw us out then divide us up and take us one at a time,' Falldess corrected him.

'Why wasn't that clear to you before the shooting started? Delvran, Conor, you know me better than that.  
'The problem is that every Grand Admiral, every oversector command, every naval academy, and every other political arm of the state who have no business doing so at all, consider it their right to add pages to the code of operations. Part of the captains' job is to make sense of the contradictions and work out what to ignore. So, yes, it was a trick question,' Lennart said.

'Let's start with the replay and go through this point by point,' he decided. The display tank they were sitting around resolved itself into a model of the system they had used for the exercise. It had all been done in virtual space, for the sake of saving time, energy and fuel - and preventing accidents. Some of the recon globe had not done nearly as well as they should.

At Day 10, Lennart had a full-up battle exercise planned; they would be firing live, full power shot at each other, firing continuing to shield failure. It was inherently extremely dangerous. It wasn't just reproducing the stress and confusion of combat; it was combat. Perhaps they would be ready.

After that, tank off to full fuel state, one sim dress-rehearsal of the operation, then move out and do it for real. That, at least, was the plan. In the meantime, there was this to learn from. 'Right, let's plan this properly from the beginning, with your experiences in mind. What's your first move?' Lennart asked.

'Establish formation and chain of command,' Barth-Elstrand suggested.

'Theoretically correct but pointless,' Lennart stated. 'You have a squadron and line structure and a clearly senior officer. That should have taken all of three seconds.' He looked at Dordd, not wanting to put him on the spot but realizing it might be necessary.

'We suffered a major internal communication breakdown, Dynamic's data system failed as she came to operational readiness. How much did that really cost us?' Dordd admitted.

'Depends what you would have done instead,' Lennart said, then turned to Vehrec.

'The sweep line. What was your plan?'

'Direct bomber attack in company with the ship's guns, smaller craft supporting as they could,' Vehrec was living up to his reputation, anyway, sprawled on a couch, apparently unconcerned, but he sounded sharp enough.

'You need to know exactly where I am to time the strike, and how are you supposed to do that if I can use my bombers to pick off the recon ships? Or direct fire. Conor?'

'I guessed where you were likely to be,' The young officer stated. 'I was right, too.'

'Terminally right; in coming to find me you offered yourself up on a plate. What was your object?'

'I knew you would have to eliminate the recon shell; thought I could draw you into chase, make you use energy and time that would give the rest of the squadron a chance to converge on you. Calculated risk.'

'When does whichever version of the book each of you happen to be using say you should begin to go evasive? Lycarin?' Lennart asked.

'Light-second maximum,' Lycarin stated. 'For good reason. 99.9% wouldn't have taken that shot, and 99.99999 couldn't.'

'So you don't evade, you fly a predictable path. Which makes extreme range alpha strikes that much more viable - not feasible, no-one takes precautions, that makes it more feasible. What will you do next time?'

'Evaluate the situation on its merits,' Elstrand said. 'Ducking and weaving too soon wastes time and energy and makes signature.'

'Next time, I could spotlight around, trying to sucker you into giving yourselves away, yes. Whoever doesn't take the bait, continues straight and level, gets the faceful of turbolaser.' Lennart smiled. 'Always another wrinkle, isn't there? What happened from there?'

The image played itself forward; Black Prince eliminating four of the recon screen with long range fire, several of the rest backing off- 'And there, what does that achieve?' Lennart asked.

'Obviously you don't look for fights you can't win - but the book is actually right this time. Back off beyond effective gun range and trail, when larger friendly units appear formate on them and add your firepower to theirs.'

'We tried,' Sarlatt said.

'Not very hard. You still think like a fighter pilot; speed and skill are what matters and damn the odds. It saved you; there were other, more rewarding targets. Speaking of which, Raesene, what orders did you receive from your line commander?'

'Sir, we-' Lennart was glaring at him. He had asked a very precise question and wanted as precise an answer. There wasn't really any way out of it. ' "Targets in sight, begin attack." That was pretty much it, captain.'

'I see. Group Captain Vehrec, explain your thinking,' Lennart asked, letting the rest of the table fill in the 'if any'.

'I assumed you had as hazy an idea of our position as we had of yours. Get ahead of your predicted track, sortie everything in a close screen with a packed attack group behind it, localize and torpedo you as you came up; the time for flight operations would have given the slower ships a chance to catch up and reform.'

'Good plan, if they had known about it. At this point, I am moving tangentially to the recon globe, deceptive jamming full - let's face it; we're an Imperator, there's no way you're not going to notice us.  
'What we can do is confuse you as to our precise location, vector and status. Take the opportunity to launch hyperdrive fighters, small craft and probe droids, for instance.'

'So that was how,' Raesene said. 'I knew we couldn't have missed a normal space approach that badly.' He had been attacked by Hunters and Avengers from Black Prince, driven them off but they had savaged a Bayonet and two Marauders in company.

'It's a useful trick. The probe droids are clear of our self noise and directional jamming, they're cheap enough that they can be fired off at will and they make excellent ranging shots for no-notice fighter microjumps. The fighters also act as targeting relays for stepdown HTL fire, enough to take out the antifighter escorts. Now at this point, with the recon shell trimmed, I aim for the gas giant, drop a couple of proton torp heads into the radiation belt in passing. Between that and our own barrage jamming, we have a respectable local whiteout. Behind the cover of that, what am I going to do next?'

'Kill velocity, reorient in a different direction, as we decelerate move out to meet us at a high aspect, medium range manoeuvring battle,' Lycarin gave the book solution.

'In theory, but a fair proportion of the rebels, and a high proportion of those that have lasted this long, are Imperial trained and know the book as well as you do. You can do one of two things - be better at it than they are, or do something strange. Most of the early, pre-Alliance Rebels loved strange. They seemed to think they couldn't win by being conventional, so they had to try something off the wall. As the amateurs and lunatics die off and the professionals get left behind, the enemy is becoming more rational, more likely to go for a straightforward, logical move.  
'If the ship's velocity is low enough, you can enter the upper atmosphere and play hide and seek with cloud layers. More likely to be done by a small ship, but that's in the book too.'

'Which is what you did with the non-hyper fighter element,' Vehrec said. 'Not what you're supposed to do when you're attacking.'

'It is a good move when you're outnumbered eight to one. Slightly more difficult with short-endurance TIEs; their being deployed there should have been a hint we were going to come back for them.'

'So you basically nest them there, they hit out at the recon corvettes and retreat back into the clouds, which means we have to waste time, energy and maybe ships blockading or going in after them. Strategic-offensive, tactical defensive. Nice,' Vehrec said.

'I shaved the margins of their endurance doing it. Now,' Lennart let the image advance half an hour, 'this is where things start to go wrong, and where I should be jumping up and down demanding people's heads on my desk.  
'Elstrand, you were expecting a bait and switch, weren't you? A near reversal of vector, Black Prince moving out like this?' Lennart sketched it on the image with a pointer laser.

'Yes, sir, I was, and I instructed my line to conform accordingly,' Elstrand stated.

'Falldess?'

'Sir, it occurred to me that small ships hide better than big ones. If you went in there, it would give too much advantage away to the smaller craft looking for you - so I thought Black Prince was going to curve round heading for the objective. Like this,' she said, moving her hand like a fighter pilot, Lennart sketching it in on the image.

'Lycarin?' he asked the Perseverance's commander, voice suddenly colder and harder.

'Captain of the Line Lennart, I went with the book option,' Lycarin said, as if in formal defence.

'So, Captain Dordd, as senior ranking officer of this mess, what were your thoughts?'

'On the tactical problem - your vector seemed to lead nowhere. I thought initially that you would take the chance of skimming the upper atmosphere of the giant, aerobraking and setting off how much radio noise, then waiting as we scattered and lunging out after the most exposed; even if we did manage to manoeuvre on to a common vector, that would waste so much time that you would be able to outreach us to the objective. So I ordered the chase aborted and all ships to make for planetary orbit. Expecting you to do something we could then react to, so that however badly screwed we were, we could at least see what to do., Dordd said.

'Suboptimal, but in that situation not unreasonable. So why didn't it happen? Group Captain Vehrec?'

'We'd just released most of our fighters. For a high speed dash across the system we had to retrieve them. Landing ops take time, and weren't helped by two squadrons of Starwings playing intruder, Sir.'

'No doubt you know better, but you fell into the trap of assuming the ship is there to serve the fighters. Classic pilot gut reaction. You don't think they happened to bounce you out of hyperspace by accident? They did it because you were in mid-retrieval. What should you have done?'

'Bring shape back into the fight. Your units were after the bombers, so I ordered the bombers to move along our best line of defence so the PD could cover them, and vectored the fighters in after your intruders.'

'If all you were up against was fighters, that would have made sense. Dordd?'

'I disregarded my own orders about five seconds later,' he admitted. 'With one ship of force paralysed in fighter action, the most sensible thing to do was to rally around her and form up as a group. I have to admit I was expecting you to build vector outwards, and then microjump in behind us and pound us while we were separated.'

'That was plan A,' Lennart said. 'Lycarin. I know that was where you were expecting me- but didn't the orders from your immediate superior convince you otherwise? Why didn't you formate on Voracious and Dynamic?'

'Voracious was off in a world of its own, and, to be blunt, Sir, I did not believe Dynamic was capable of any useful assistance. She was so slow in executing any move that I believed we were effectively on our own. And said so,' Lycarin stated.

'My plan B fell into place when you separated. I had a shot at the Perseverance from least-effective missile range closing, and took it. Falldess, attempting to close on and support Perseverance was the right choice. The execution, though: did you intend to scatter support craft along your line of flight?'

'Captain, we could arrive all together and too late, or piecemeal and in time to matter. I regret the loss of Jointure and Splenetic, but-' Falldess objected.

'Another trick question. Look at your vector; you'd have been heading outsystem with too much way on to manoeuvre back into the fight. You got one good firing pass out of that, then spent the rest of the exercise retrieving life pods.'

'I don't understand. Am I supposed to leave them drifting?' Falldess said, irritated.

'Officially, yes. You fight it out to the finish, and when there's none of the enemy left standing, then you pick up survivors. Unofficially, very few people scooped up from a drifting life pod have objected. Just wait until you're no longer likely to join them before you start retrieval.'

'Gunnery tactics,' Lennart said, zooming in. 'With full converged salvos, you miss a lot. On average, you're more likely to kill a ship sooner with spread fire closing to effective range. We fire converged sheaf salvos because a solid hit usually overloads the surge capacity of the target's shielding and starts doing real damage very quickly. We're able to do this because all of my gun crews, primary, secondary and most of the reserve, have put in upwards of ten thousand hours training time. Work towards that, but first, work the numbers and do what gives you the best chance.  
'Speaking of which, Delvran, your ship did some good shooting. Question; would I have been better off, switching target from Voracious to Dynamic after she had started to score hits, or not?'

'Another trick question, Sir?' Elstrand stated. 'You do whatever reduces the enemy's firepower by the greatest amount in the least time, Unless political or operational concerns intervene.'

'Which is the principle you base your judgements on, but in this case, what practical result does the principle produce?'

'Switch targets,' Kovall said. 'Why did you stay on the carrier?'

'The Venator's a theoretically easier target; once we take her out, we only have two ships of force close enough and fast enough to worry about, one already damaged,' Lennart said, not telling the entire truth.

The image played itself out to conclusion. Black Prince's course track was a z-shape, out from the giant, raking fire into Perseverance, accelerating at a sharp angle to pass Voracious on the far side of her from Dynamic; the fast destroyer manoeuvring for a clear shot, the destroyer-carrier coming apart in a wave of green fire, the final gun duel between the two destroyers, swirling round each other at close quarters, high aspect; the broader, three-engined Imperator, better balanced, sidestepping the firing arcs of the fast but clumsy Arrogant. In the little flickers of moves begun and aborted, actions and reactions, it was possible to see that the judgement of Dynamic's captain outran the ability of his crew to put it into practise.

After the explosion, the rest was coda. Black Prince accelerated inward, delivered a bombardment as specified in the terms of the exercise, retrieved her fighters and jumped outsystem for a tanker rendezvous.

'Individually, most of you made mostly right choices, most of the time,' Lennart said. 'Collectively it was a disaster. Vehrec; for this one, more than half your fighters were imaginary. That made operations smoother than otherwise. The fact that you chose to act as a second attack force was barely justifiable in theory, in practise catastrophic. Lycarin, you disobeyed an order to take a chance - that failed. Do that in the flesh and you'll be lucky to live long enough to be strung up. Captain Dordd, I'll want to talk to you later.  
'I want post-battle analyses from each of you. Your own opinion of your performance. We will be repeating this or something like it in a few days - the full squadron, against a computer controlled four ship division of MC-80s.'

There was little overt reaction among command grade officers, but he detected several suppressed curses in his direction. Fine. 'Dismiss.' The holograms faded out, leaving Dordd still sitting there, image glowing slightly blue.

'Do you believe me now, when I say three months to a decent state of efficiency?' he said.

Lennart decided to avoid all recriminations and cut straight to the chase. 'What are you going to do differently next time?'

'Let my bridge team do their own jobs. I got the balance wrong; spent too much time on my own ship rather than on the squadron, failed to impose my will on them, failed to impose shape on the operation - not a great start, was it?' Dordd said.

'That's why I left you to last and pushed in for a close turning fight. Work them a little. How did your crew react?' Lennart asked.

'Badly. I know you fired no real shot, but you left a trail of broken men behind anyway - I have fifteen requests in to resign commissions including two department deputies, and eighty enlisted trying to commit offences just severe enough to be reassigned or discharged.'

'How many of them are you tempted to accept?'

'As far as I can tell, make or break for this ship happened three years ago, on squadron manoeuvres; a bungled helm order resulted in her ramming a strike cruiser. It broke up, blew up when the ion flare touched it, ruptured a fuel line - contamination and fires onboard. The inquiry ended in a string of court-martials. She was an unhappy ship before that, mutual blame and denunciation resulted in a breakdown of command.  
'When she was punted out to the rim, they left too many of the existing officers on board, officers who hated each other. She's gone from unhappy to poisonous self-loathing tempered only by apathy.' Dordd said.

'You do have my authority to hire and fire,' Dordd opened his mouth; Lennart said it first. 'One exception - Aldrem. We're reopening the axial defence turrets, mounting three 480's off the Kestrel. I want him back as battery commander for that.'

'He is not well liked on board. He's been arrogant, pushy, demanding, abrasive and worst of all, right. He's got no patience with that depth of ineptitude - he could teach advanced, but not remedial. As a battery commander, I could use him; as an instructor officer, disastrous. Why did you bump him up to commissioned rank, by the way?'

'So he would be in a position to tell you what's going on, of course,' Lennart said.

'Right. Exhausting being in charge, isn't it? I'm starting to understand the distant, formal type a lot better now.' Dordd sighed. 'My command style so far seems to involve a lot of cold fury and barely suppressed urges to strangle junior officers.'

'Being the skipper is a job that throws your eccentricities into high relief, true. When I recommended you for command, I knew you were going to get something demanding,' Lennart said.

'I would have to deal with this one way or another. Probably better, having the chance to do so in company - at least this way we can draw off some of the bad blood, for purely professional reasons.'

'Good. I want your report, too, but apart from that, what do you make of them?' Lennart asked, waving at the now-empty seats.

'Professional opinion? Vehrec should not be in a multiple branch command, not with ships and troops under his authority. He thought, "what can my fighters do?" and set out to find a mission for them. Not many of Delta and Epsilon came back, did they?'

'No, but by the time we attacked him and his fighter swarm had a chance to attack us, there weren't enough of his bombers left to matter. And I see what you mean, he doesn't think "ship",' Lennart said, broadly in agreement. 'Something else to work on. Lycarin?'

'He would sell his grandmother, and at least one of his balls, for your reputation,' Dordd said, with suppressed anger. 'He has the courage to rely on his own judgment, but he got very formal when it went wrong. He's rooted in the system, all that staff time, but wishing he had the chutzpah to break out. He is good, but not that good; he has a higher opinion of his own talents than they deserve. I think given an independent command he would overreach himself.'

'Language like that, from the vulture?' Lennart said. 'What he did would have amounted to an act of mutiny if it had been on a real operation. I have enough rope to hang him, but I want his own account of his behaviour before I decide on the long or the short drop.'

'How much damage did Kovall do to us?' Dordd asked. 'He microjumped out, guessed right, and gave us an early contact that we couldn't afford to ignore. In effect he assisted you, didn't he?'

'It worked out that way, yes. Almost a shame, we didn't see enough of him to make a full judgement. Raesene, too - what did you make of him? Something's not right there,' Lennart said, antennae twitching.

'Yes,' Dordd realized. 'Slow answering orders, quick carrying them out. Fast thinking, slow to explain. Either the bridge crew are running that ship and using him as their front man, or - I don't know. The medium frigates and lesser didn't really have enough to do to tell.'

'If we're lucky, it'll just be an exercise, but we may actually have to do a search-and-retrieve for a modular support cruiser; the one that was supposed to be coming to relieve us of our rebel prisoners. That ship is now suspiciously late,' Lennart said. 'That should give the frigates and corvettes a workout. What about the recon lines?'

'Falldess comes from a world that's barely out of the stone age, but in a bizarre way, that actually works for her. Because she has little instinctive grasp, she has to think about what she's doing - which too many are too eager to display proper zeal to bother. In an open-ended, cerebral fight, probe or hunter operations, she would do well.'

'I agree. The risks she took weren't worth the return, but that's what this series of exercises is all about. Elstrand was a disappointment; he still hasn't recovered, and if there was anyone I would be tempted to replace as a line commander, right now it would be him.'

'Who with, Brenn?' Dordd asked.

'The obvious choice. There was one other aspect to this; I was hoping you would be able to present a credible threat, because with Adannan on board, it's possible the Squadron may have to do it for real.'

Dordd was too tired to react demonstratively to that, but it was a scaring thought. 'Get your report in to me soonest; I have to start planning the next round.'

'Good luck. Dynamic out.' Dordd broke the connection.

Lennart ordered the terminal, 'External, Comarre, get me Commander Mirannon.'

'Gethrim? Jorian,' Lennart began, once the com team had found him. 'Busy?'

'Three for one, as usual. To one significant figure it cancels out, which is better than I was expecting,' Mirannon said, then remembered he hadn't actually asked permission.

'We're rotating the rest of the squadron's damage control detachments through Comarre Meridian to assess them and bring them up to speed. That OK?'

'I expect you could get away with a lot more than that if you want, now. The midichlorian counts are in and there are two people on board potentially subject to Order 66. You and me.'

'Me?' Mirannon said. Lennart wouldn't pull that for a prank, not even he himself would; it was so enormously mad it was probably true. 'I need the Force like I need webbed feet and feathers. What the kriff good is it to an engineer? What am I supposed to do, turn bolts telekinetically? Draw blueprints at superhuman speed?'

'I can think of at least two things,' Lennart said. 'You do as much of the hands on work as you can find an excuse for, and you work longer hours than almost anyone else. You think you're doing that without help? The other aspect - energy resistance. If a dark Jedi can walk through flamer fire, you can deal with heat, neutrino waves, live cables-'

'All of that, we have tools and procedures to work with, I would be setting a dangerously bad example not using them. Sooner or later, someone else would get careless, and get killed, doing something I could do and they couldn't,' Mirannon said.

'As for the hours, I'm supposed to get enthusiastic about a personality damaging, ultra-high maintenance caf alternative?'

'Look, I hate the idea too, but I don't think we have much option. As far as I can tell, there's never been a coherent list of what the Force can and can't do - too much mystic nonsense and too many secrets kept - so I'm trying to put it together from memories, legends, and marginal sources no-one got around to classifying.'

'So what are we looking at? Obviously there's the second-order stuff, force versus force, which we may have to pay more attention to than would otherwise be justified because of Adannan, but what is there of primary usefulness to me or you?' Mirannon said.

'Not much that I can think of off the top of my head,' Lennart admitted. 'I was hoping that if I could manage to persuade you it was worth taking seriously, then maybe you could do the same for me.'

'How easy is it for a trainee Force user to blow himself up? Self-teaching may not be the smartest plan,' Mirannon said. 'The non-option - Force users in name only? We can deal with Adannan by other means, and metaphorically take the money and run.'

'Psychologically damaging, one way or the other, and of questionable usefulness, but the fringe benefits are excellent?' Lennart summarized. 'I don't want to give in to this line of thinking because it sounds too good to be true, but historically, most Force users have been trained from diapers up. Moulded by the Force, in some sense taken over by it. So there almost certainly is a gee-gosh-wow-zap-kapow element to it, stuck somewhere between repressed childishness and a child's image of maturity.'

'Doesn't hold water,' Mirannon said. 'Your theory is that the potential of the Force resolves down to what the users make of it, the known powers are what the historical users have made of it? So a middle aged career officer is naturally going to find things in the force that cloister-raised monks miss.'

'You sound skeptical.' Lennart said.

'I am. They had enough time and enough people to throw at the problem; inefficient or not, they would have had to be superhumanly stupid not to fill out the possibility envelope in twenty thousand years. I'm not discounting that, but probability is, what they knew of is all there is. So what are the known possibilities?' Mirannon asked.

'The sheer incoherence of the list makes me think 'superhumanly stupid' is very possible. Or maybe just incomplete research on my part. First up, telekinesis - apparently the ability to move yourself, move someone else and move inanimate objects are separate talents, breaking down into a shoal of microtalents depending on who you listen to.'

'On the face of it, I could have a use for that,' Mirannon admitted. 'Transhuman strength and dexterity, but the limit isn't biology; it's whether or not it's better than the tools for the job. The other options?'

'As far as I can tell, there's biomanipulation, senses natural and unnatural, and a whole incoherent spectrum of illogical, inexplicable and grotesquely unpleasant ways to kill people. There's a lot more detail, but those are essentially the heads of proposals.'

'That's not a child, a celibate or a eunuch; you're describing an animal. Man as life form, not as rational actor.'

'That way of looking at it makes a lot of things fall into place,' Lennart agreed. 'For myself, I'm looking at the sensory talents. They seem the most potential use to me.'

'What would be of most use to you would be to go down to Main Machinery-2 and put in some sparring time. Start learning how to hit people with a lightsabre, because sure as stang you're going to need it.'


	28. Chapter 28

Black Prince's Fighter Direction Centre was usually busy, even when there was nothing much going on. There were always situations to be monitored, exercises to be run, ground services to be coordinated. Initially a cavernous, empty space, it had long since been modified - a web of internal bracing, then deck plates laid over them, converting the open pit and tiers of wall galleries into three separate decks.

The main tactical tank was still in place on the original lower deck, with the controllers' subchambers for the four squadrons of the fighter wing around it, but the next deck up was operational planning, surface action support, and the control pens for the bomb wing, and the top deck maintenance and status, and control for the transports and multirole wing.

In the operational planning bay, Air Commodore Olleyri and his control team were doing their own post-exercise analysis.

'Countermoves. What do you do about an enemy fighter force that's turtled in a planet of your own system? How do you deal with the sort of threat we presented there? Ideas?' Olleyri asked; most of the senior controllers and the squadron and wing leaders were gathered with him around the central display table.

'Ignore it,' Beta One said. 'As such. They stay in there and they're neutralised. They come out to fight, we pursue and intercept as normal. How close were you,' he asked Iota One, 'to running out of air?'

'It's not the air that's the problem. It's the fuel and ordnance. To get any real advantage from that situation, we have to move fast, which is the main reason the TIE lifesystem is crap,' Iota One said.

'The fuel is the limiting factor, the life system was designed down to that. Upgrading is trivial, but to get any really greater combat endurance, we need more fuel, which is vicious circle time again. Hit and run especially.'

'You're just jealous because you haven't got a hyperdrive,' Beta One said.

'It is more fuel efficient for those Alliance clunkers to short-jump than thrust a lot of the time - which means high relative velocity when we overrun them and strafe them to bits. Swings and roundabouts.'

'Waiting out TIEs might work, but think operational. We often won't have the luxury of time, due to political pressure. Rahandravell?' The boss turned to the newest, and temporary, addition to his team of controllers.

Franjia's hoverchair was bobbing up and down beside the main display table; she was out of her hospital bed, but they wouldn't let her get back into the cockpit yet. Worse, instead of letting her join and lead Epsilon in the battle, from a sim tank, Olleyri had ordered her to join him in the direction centre. He had made a joke of it, mocking her sim habit, but it was also an order.

'The hidden lair is less important than hidden eyes. Its recon assets the hidden force needs more than anything else, so whoever has jamming ascendancy has the edge. The attacking force can't time their lunges, can't reliably find weak points to strike,' she said.

'Blanket barrage jamming, in a friendly system, has several disadvantages. Traffic control, for one, and if civilian freighters are wandering around blind, deaf and dumb, that makes them easy targets,' Olleyri countered.

'So you- ahh. That ought to work. Spysats and probe droids around the planet, create a line of control, oh.'

'Turns into a meeting engagement on the fringes of the atmosphere, advantage defender. So you do it as a two-parter, fast flyby shootings by one team, take out the eyes, when the opposition move out to defend them the second team in closer orbit ambushes them - with luck piecemeal, if not?' He let her come up with the next piece of the puzzle.

'Fly an evasive holding action and take what you can while the second formation rejoins the fight. We-'

There was a buzz from the com terminal. Olleyri turned to it. 'CAG. What's the situation, bridge?'

'Incoming transport dangerously overdue.' It was Brenn, playing the part of the Captain's shadow as ever. 'We were supposed to rendezvous with a Modular Cruiser which was tasked to take the rebel prisoners off our hands before they could do anything, for instance attempt to escape.'

'Now it's passed from late to missing presumed lost, and you want us to sweep for it. Why would the rebs hit a prisoner transport on the way to the pickup, not the way back?' Olleyri wondered.

'No good reason, so it's almost certainly a bad one,' Brenn said, meaning that at best something improbable had happened, at worst something political. Olleyri nodded slightly to show he understood; Brenn continued

'Long range scan has nothing, don't even start looking at less than seventy-five light years out. You'll have backup so load for anti-fighter, we'll have course menus ready to download in twenty minutes.'

'Sir, can I-' Franjia began.

'No,' Olleyri said. 'They say another four days before you're fit. Assuming they're being overcautious as usual, count on another two days before I let you try to get killed again.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' she said, disappointed, although it wasn't that unreasonable. 'This is going to be a squadron operation?'

'No, we'll be deploying every hyperdrive capable fighter we can muster, backed up by the corvettes. Pass the alert then fifteen minute break, everyone, get calories and stim up, this is going to be a long search or a short encounter battle.'

Lennart had taken his chief engineer's advice. The reports would take a little time to write up anyway; he could afford a hundred minutes for fencing practise, and if the command team were going to have to take an increasing share of running the ship, they may as well start now. Brenn had been left in charge of organising the recon sweep for the missing modular cruiser, for a start.

Once - back when he was a junior officer - he had carried a datapad with him everywhere, constantly scribbling down notes, trivia, facts and events, trying to get his head around what was happening. Now, although he did his best to hoover up any information that crossed his path, he tried to keep it all in his head. Partly to keep his brain fit, partly so that he could be busy while managing to look cool, calm and collected.

He supposed that the Force had been helping him with that too, and cursed it for it - then realised what he was doing. That was one of their recruitment techniques, wasn't it? The Force flows through all things, influences and affects everything you do. You aren't the person you thought you were anyway - so give in and become one with the Force.

Balls to that, Lennart thought. The main question is, to what extent were the Jedi honest practitioners, and to what extent a self- erpetuating cult? To what extent was it necessary to follow their code to safely and effectively wield the Force, and to what extent was it a matter of what amounted to brainwashing?

This turbolift needs more 'turbo', he thought, grumpily. They give far too much time to think. He wondered how many defaulters, hauled into the Captain's presence for transgressions too severe for a divisional officer to deal with, had been saved by a lift by the time it gave them to come up with some explanation or answer?

Or how many had been condemned by being given too much time, enough to overdo it and trip up on their own lies.

Which does connect right back to the question. Their relationship to the Force had been a kind of institutionalised schizophrenia, as he saw it; on one hand so terrified of falling to the dark side that they ruled much of what the Force was capable of to be off limits, on the other hand virtually abolishing their own personalities to enslave themselves to it.

Or fear, he realised. If Gethrim was right, and looking at the short list he had put together he seemed to be, the Force was a thing of feelings and emotions, needs and drives above all else; exactly what the Jedi forbade themselves. So the traditional way was out - even before taking Order 66 into account.

Or possibly sublimated their feelings by only allowing themselves to experience them through the Force. If the modern - well, immediate prewar - Jedi Order was a decayed remnant of its former self, corrupted into near uselessness by a small green fool who couldn't distinguish the means from the end, then what had it originally been? Had it always been without a mandate to help people? For some professions - the strongest example he could think of was from the medical side - simply doing their jobs well would ensure that good things happened to people, and any emotional involvement would represent a loss of ability to do the job. So relentless perfectionism was the only permissible, and in the last analysis only necessary, form of compassion.

How could you have the Force, be literally one in a trillion at the most generous estimate, and not try to be either a hero or a villain? There must have been a mandate. Couldn't not have been.

So the 'no attachments' rule made a kind of sense after all, except that somehow the original purpose had got lost along the way, the rule itself had become the objective. The Jedi order had reduced itself to accepting only the young and the impressionable, and dedicated itself to the waste and disuse of its power.

What were the traditional branches of the order - consular, guardian, sentinel? If there ever had been such a thing as a Jedi Knight-Errant, they were more than a thousand years extinct.

The lift doors hissed open on the office bay of Main Machinery-2. As per standing orders, no-one who was actually busy bothered to stand up and salute. They acknowledged him, of course, but not the full leap to feet, click heels and dislocate elbow ritual.

For a moment, he started to reach for his sabre. How dare they? How did these insignificant worms, these nobodies who only breathed by his will, fail to grovel in his presence? He should- He should smack himself upside the head, before he lost the plot entirely. He just stood there, reeling slightly from the bolt-from-the-blue flash of anger that had nearly possessed him.

'Skipper, you OK?' the watch officer asked.

'No, no, I don't think I am,' he said, dragging himself back to some kind of normality. He took a deep breath and started again.

'There are some strange things happening in my head, and I also have a rather urgent need to practise hitting people. Given both those facts, do you have such a thing as a sparring droid, expendable or at least rebuildable?'

Never mind the grapevine, he thought, I've just dropped a bloody melon. That'll get around fast.

'Not in one piece, I don't think, Sir. Ten minutes?'

Ah, Lennart thought. The dark side has enough brains to find a natural point of weakness. On some near surface, automatic-formal level, I do expect to be honoured and obeyed.

'If you could find a live opponent, someone good enough that I'm unlikely to be able to hurt him even if I do lose the plot?' he asked.

'Sir.' The watch officer contained his surprise fairly well, sent one of the leading spacemen off to look.

As the captain of an Imperator-class destroyer, I must rank high on any scale of authoritarianism, he thought. And yet I've used the contradictions in the regulations - which are not nearly as large or as many as I usually make them out to be - to throw half of them away and rewrite the other half to suit.

My ship looks like a wreck, my crew are half crazy already; and somehow they still jump when I tell them to. So, this illusion of freedom thing, who's fooling who? Between training, background, being on the receiving end of propaganda, they know how ruthless the Empire can be, probably better than I do. So what makes more sense - that I have managed to create some kind of microcosm, or that a man from a planet notorious for spawning chancers, rulebreakers, oddballs and maniacs is kidding himself?

Are their collective forty-six thousand minds more intelligent than my one? For some things, maybe. For speedy and decisive action in a crisis, no, which is why a ship has to have a captain and he has to be an autocrat. For social judgement, yes, many vague takes may be better than one sharp. Even disregarding the natural effect of perspective, as between giver and receiver of orders and punishment, obviously I am more of a bastard than I like to admit.

So treat this as a problem. What are the potential outcomes, and what are the tools to hand? Is unstinting self-knowledge the key? Kriff, I hope not, considering I've just put off getting a midichlorian count for twenty years.

Self-deception might be more to the point, considering how much of the Force seemed to be based on it. No, he decided. I am going to treat this as if it was a behaviour-altering disease, move slowly, think very carefully, examine every action to see whether it is a product of the affliction. Which is actually the strongest argument anyone's come up with for embracing the Force yet- the time involved in fighting it.

'Sir? This way,' the watch officer said. Lennart followed him.

As Captain, the only part of the ship off limits to him was the imperial suite. Everywhere else he could go as he pleased; having to be invited to join the wardroom was convention and tradition, not law.

That didn't mean he had. Main Machinery-1 he was reasonably familiar with, but that was the clean bright and shiny end: central control complexes, offices, planning and refresher training. Main Machinery-2 was a warren of workshops and laboratories and storerooms, folded away like the intestines of the ship. Lennart suspected they moved the bulkheads around from time to time anyway, just to stay in practise.

The training hall was almost empty; between routine maintenance, the axial defence turrets, and the major repair job in progress on the Comarre Meridian, most of Black Prince's engineers had no time and energy spare to keep up their practise. Disused machine tools and pieces of tools along one long bulkhead, including the casing of a second-hand molecular furnace that Mirannon swore was no longer radioactive, storage bins along the other.

There were four men there, obviously waiting for him; two leading hands, a petty officer and a reactor charge chief, Vilberksohn.

'Morning, Charge chief,' Lennart said, addressing the senior rank as per protocol.

'Morning, Captain,' Vilberksohn said, trying not to sound bleary. 'You have a sudden need to hit people, Sir?' At five in the kriffing AM, he didn't quite say.

'That too, Charge chief.' He brought out the lightsabre, thought about it. Shoved it back in his pocket. 'The closest you have would probably be a welding torch. I want to try that.'

Five torches were retrieved from one of the storage bins, Lennart was handed one of them. 'Ever used one of these before, Sir?'

'No, not in anger anyway.'

They looked at each other, thinking "it's true; the old man's finally flipped." Lennart caught them doing it; they snapped back to eyes-front. He couldn't really blame them.

'Shall we start with the basics?' the Charge Chief said, not quite entirely concealing his scepticism.

'May as well, but the accelerated version, you hear? We have just under ten days, now, before this might matter.'

They thought about that and leaped to a correct conclusion. 'Then, Sir, the only move you really need to know is how to trap his blade, and then shoot him with the blaster you should have in your other hand,' Vilberksohn said.

'That might be just a little too basic,' Lennart said. Never mind the fact that he might be expecting it.

'Don't get me wrong, Captain, the biomechanics of this are fascinating, and there's more than a human lifespan's worth of information on sword and pseudo-sword fighting. It's a great hobby, but there are easier ways of killing somebody.'

'I know you're trying to help, Vilberksohn, but the politics of the situation mean this is the way it has to be. No shortcuts.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Vilberksohn said, words correct, tone deeply sceptical. He activated the blades, said, 'Exercise setting.'

'These are non-standard, then?' Lennart asked.

'Sir, as a tool, you're looking for precise control response, focused on the task, not time critical; for a weapon you're looking at a totally different set of requirements. You cannot afford to need to control the thing precisely in a fight. The blob at the back, flip it open.'

The 'blob' was a round, oversized pommel; Lennart unfolded it, found a keypad, two thumb sticks, four sliders, two discs.

'Now seal it up again, Sir, because you don't need to worry about any of that. As a weapon, we add biometrics and presets so you can reliably voice control the thing.'

On exercise, the blades looked smaller and brighter than they had at first; Lennart waved his through the air to get the feel of it.

'Sir, exactly how much of this have you done?'

'Five or six training sessions with Commander Mirannon, I have a hazy, drunken memory of a dawn duel with a minor offshoot of the House of Tagge, and a boarding action during Second Coruscant. Most of that is a blur, too. I seem to remember jumping on a Destroyer Droid's back and smashing its head in with a vibro-axe…the after action report said it happened, so it must be true.'

There were other reasons why Lennart's memories of that day were fuzzy, but they were none of his business.

'So you have spilt oil in anger, then,' The Charge chief said.

'DC-15Se in the other hand, too, at least to begin with. You were saying about the basics?'

The charge chief went through the standard cuts, first set direct strikes at the centre of mass, then sweeping cuts, then thrusts, blade simply a continuous arc, a blur.

'I was being sarcastic, Sir,' he said, not bothering to stop. 'Like a true lightsabre, the blade is effectively weightless; all the mass is in the hilt. No momentum, it moves as fast as the hand and eye behind it can move. The reason the lightsabre is- was- the signature Jedi weapon is that, in anyone else's hands, the fight's over in half a second. They're all offence.  
'When they meet, it's down to the strength of the wielder- but you need strength to parry, not to attack. If you can get your opponent to make a major movement in response to a small movement, over-react and leave himself open, you can gut him with a twitch of the wrist. Sweeping parries and the like are big, wide, slower movements - attack is faster. The only real defence is to get them before they get you.'

Lenart moved his welding torch through the standard moves, getting a few of them wrong, sloppy, working up to speed. He concentrated on exactly how it felt, trying to feel if the Force was at all involved.

'Lightly, Sir, lightly, the blade does all the work, keep it fluid. Feel up to trying a little free fight?'

'Depends on how likely I am to be able to walk away from it,' Lennart said, looking at the blade. 'Tell me more about this exercise setting.'

'Basically, Sir, there's barely enough plasma to pressurise the containment field, and that's set for fuzzy edge. It'll scorch, sting and deliver momentum, but it won't cut and cauterise.'

'So, rather like being beaten with a red-hot blunt stick,' Lennart said.

'Unscientifically put but essentially true, Sir. We find that people take learning more seriously when there's something at stake,' the charge chief said, quoting his captain.

'I am thinking of finally having the ship repainted,' Lennart said, apparently off hand.

'Sir,' Vilberksohn said, formally, snapping his cutting torch to the guard position.

They began; at first circling warily, Lennart trying to keep his blade between his body and the charge chief's, thinking defensively in as far as he had any time to think at all. Pure stimulus and reflex; at most snatched tenths of seconds to form words, to consciously observe - first touch was a blade dropping on to his shoulder, he smashed it aside and thought kriff, wrong, as it flickered back, tipped up and dropped again as he was wildly out of position - Lennart crouched back, out of most of it, but it stung.

He shook his head as if to clear it, said, 'I see what you mean, Charge Chief. How much are you holding back?'

'Sir, if I just went straight for you, I'd win maybe ninety percent of the time - that's an estimate. You wouldn't learn anything. Try again.'

Lennart did; striking for the tip of the charge chief's blade, it dipped out of the way, so Lennart jerked back out of the way of the return stroke that somehow hovered in front of his eyes, looped around twisting out of the way of a hasty counterstroke, touched him under the lowest left rib. Lennart reeled back, almost taking his own nose off with the torch, but it wasn't all impact; most of it was sudden reaction.

He stepped back and brought the blade up to guard position then lashed out in a rolling disarm. Vilberksohn managed to avoid losing his blade, continued the twist to bring it back to guard. Lennart smashed it the other way, got inside and was about to crash the edge of his blade against the Charge Chief's throat when he realised what he was doing.

So that was how it's supposed to work, he thought briefly, before Vilberksohn, acting on pure reflex, brought his blade in and up and hit Captain Lennart across the spine. He crumpled, ended up crouching on the ground supporting himself with one arm.

'Ahhh. I am clearly not looking hard enough at you people; if you can manage to pound each other like this and still turn up fit for duty next day, you obviously don't have enough to do,' he said, refusing to be angry. That flash of speed, where he had seemed to be looking out from slightly behind his own eyeballs, as if he had been plucked out of the universe and put down at a slightly skewed angle - the Force. The dark side, to be more specific. It would have done real damage if he hadn't pulled it short just in time.

'Sir, if it isn't bleeding out and hasn't fallen off, it doesn't count. Ready?'

No, would be the honest answer. He wanted to go and sit and think about what that felt like, and what it meant. The Force didn't have a mind of its own, wasn't really the product of mind, just of life - but it could exploit his. It would hit him at what he thought were his own weak points, and it was thirty years too late to start trying to trick it.

Time to see if he could hold it back.

'Yes.' Lennart pulled himself back to his feet, raised the cutting torch to try again. This time, another drop on to the shoulder, at first he tried to sweep it aside, then thought that if he pushed the charge chief's blade away he would simply duck round and in. He stepped back and tried to push the chief's blade up in the air with an extended down-and-up sweeping parry. It worked solely because Vilberksohn couldn't understand what he was trying to do and pulled back.

Lennart tried the same move himself to see how the charge chief handled it; the countermove was sidestep and riposte, twisting in and catching his captain's left arm.

'This is getting monotonous,' Lennart said, shaking himself out and getting ready to try again.

'Captain, you're trying too hard. Maybe you're just not yet ready for a live target.'

'So convince me,' Lennart said, returning to guard position, and deliberately trying to reach out for the passive, herbivore side of the Force, to form that quasi-religious connection to all things the stories spoke of. To his considerable surprise, it worked; to his very great relief, it was a genuinely unfamiliar sensation, somewhere between lucid dreaming and fever-induced out of body detachment. He was still marvelling at it when the charge chief's blade hit him in the gut.

'Never try that. Never try to wait your opponent into doing something stupid, Sir,' Vilberksohn said, as Lennart pulled himself together.

'It's been a long time since I've lost, really lost, at anything. I suppose it's probably good for my spiritual growth or something, but I could live without it. Let's try that again.'

'Captain, Sir, under certain circumstances I think most Imperial spacemen would relish the chance to beat the shit out of their commanding officer, but…maybe you should go back to basics and start with some simple exercises.'

'How long have you been doing this?' Lennart asked him.

'Ten years, Sir. Since before we were famous.'

'I have ten days before this is going to matter. It's the deep end or nothing. Let's-'

'Captain?' it was the duty watch officer, at the entrance to the hall. 'Urgent from the bridge. They think they've found her but the circumstances don't make sense. They want your presence.'

'Saved,' Lennart admitted, clicking off the blade.

In the lift on the way back up to the bridge he asked himself, so what have I learned?

Apart from that getting hit is bad. That whatever natural talent with a lightsabre I have it is going to take a lot of effort, and probably pain, to bring out. That some of my engineers do not have nearly enough to do to keep them out of trouble.

No point punishing him. It was mostly my fault, anyway.

Mainly that if feelings are anything to go by, and in this they are, then he had not been making much use of the Force to date. That surge of disembodied hyperclarity, that was new. Genuinely unfamiliar apart from the odd student recreational drug experience, which he had never been much for anyway.

And that makes me much happier to realise that my record is basically clean, that I have got this far without needing to call on the Force in any but the most preconscious, inexplicit way, than it does to know that I can when I need to, he thought.

The lift doors opened, he walked - limping slightly - through the entry chamber and on to the bridge.

'Good morning, Captain. You'd think that with thirty-seven thousand people, we'd be able to work shifts,' Brenn said, yawning slightly. 'Elements of Gamma and Epsilon are in contact; target's apparently dropped out of hyperspace to recompute a course, coasting under hotel load.'

'Everyone else has the privileges of working shifts; department heads are permanently on call. What made you decide that she's a target rather than a contact?'

'Positioning,' Brenn said, called up the sector map. 'From there, to here, via way-over-yonder? No mechanical malfunction that would leave them in as good a shape as the fighters are reporting could cause that. A navigational screwup should leave them falling over themselves to call for help or at least make excuses rather than going 'umm, who me?' It's possible that the captain is either an idiot or a lunatic, but - no, I don't like it.'

'Com/scan, patch me in. Aerospace group, multirole wing, Gamma One.' The link beeped when it was established, then 'Jandras? Black Prince Actual. Have you made any attempt to contact the modular cruiser?'

Aron, riding his still unfamiliar Hunter, was a light second away on the cruiser's port beam, beyond accurate gun but well within sensor range, lead flight with him, the three of Epsilon lead less Franjia ten thousand kilometres astern and to port.

'IFF squirt, Captain. Verifies as Imperial at low confidence. No voice or data, either way.'

'How does it smell to you?' Lennart asked.

'Sour, Captain. Do you want us to go in for a close inspection?' Aron asked. According to the Hunter's files, modular cruisers carried a solidly anti-ship armament, bizarrely ineffectual point defence but a decent spread of medium turbolasers, intended to keep off the likes of heavy corvettes and light frigates. Relatively easy for a fighter to approach.

'Negative, Gamma One, what I may need you for is wild weasel. Plan to make attack runs on her guns and EW emitters. Com,' he said to his com/scan team, who cut Aron out of the part he didn't need to know, 'get me the customs corvettes.'

'Aye, Sir - wait one, connecting now.'

A holoimage appeared on the main terminal; head and shoulders of a woman in severe-cut customs service uniform. 'SFA(I) Rontaine, Captain. What is it you need from us?' Dark, very close-cropped hair, sharp-nosed, hard face - relatively young, but dressed and acted older, Lennart thought. Probably a nightmare to work for.

'Senior Field Agent (Interdiction)? Which of your clutch of corvettes has the best inspection sensor fit?' Lennart asked her.

'All six have the same sensor suite, all of them regularly achieve 'excellent' or better efficiency ratings,' she said, aggressive-defensive. Surprisingly so; how dare you criticise, was the subtext.

'And all of them could be taken over and run by Starfleet crews, if you keep trying to mess me about. Whatever grudge you have, live with it. Answer the question,' Lennart said, sharply.

'There's no need to be like that,' Rontaine said, surprised.

'Really? If I give you a task, are you going to do it, or am I going to have to micromanage you every step of the way?'

There was a long pause. 'Captain, we seem to have got off to a bad start. What is the mission?'

'Essentially a customs job. Our stray modular cruiser has finally arrived - sufficiently late to make me suspicious. It's carrying an interrogation module, with standard prison security shields and baffles. I want to see what's inside them.'

It was interesting, watching Rontaine's face change: from a poor imitation of proper subordination, to shock, to determination not to be found wanting - over a thick bottom layer of 'oh kriff' - to thinking about the mission in hand.

'Acknowledged,' she said, not wanting to provoke further a superior who had already taken one bite out of her hide. 'Proceeding to contact, CN27AJ-'

'Do you really think that's all there is to it?' Lennart interrupted her. 'I threw you a trick question and you fumbled it. The ship you want to send on this job is the one with the best track record of not being shot. Instead, you let some old grudge or snit dominate your thinking to the point where you are now about to rush off to go rancor baiting without proper coordination or preparation. Talk me through how you're going to do this.'

'Sir, I reacted poorly, and now I want to make up for that by going and getting the job done.' From his expression she realised she wasn't getting off the hook. 'Approach from 50deg off the bow on a crossing course close to, match velocities for inspection.'

'With?' Lennart added.

'Shields up, weapons manned and jammers on standby. All of this is standard procedure in the customs service as much as it is in the navy,' she said. 'Approaching a suspicious contact.' She was trying not to sound more than mildly irritated.

'There are fighter elements ready to cover you. The rest of the search units will be converging on the contact to form a cordon. Report your findings as you make them. Navigation downloading now, Black Prince Actual out.'

He dropped the link, turned to his bridge crew, found com/scan had already located and displayed Rontaine's personnel file. He started reading through it; the single most important fact leapt out at him. Eris Rontaine was a graduate of the sector's naval academy - eighty-fifth in a class of twenty-five hundred. On graduation, she had not taken - no, he noticed, not been offered a commission in the Starfleet. For someone that high up the class rankings, to be given nothing - without even accumulated demerits as an excuse - was almost unheard of. Possibly it was no more than misogyny, possibly a personal grudge, either way it would have been an embittering experience.

Denied that, she had found another path, and hacked her way up the ladder, on proficiency and professionalism; her six ship division had an outstanding record - for this sector, anyway - but if she enjoyed her job, she hid it well.

She would have looked up her commanding officer, and found from the less heavily classified portions of his own service record that he had been an instructor for four years himself. That would bias her against him to begin with, as part of the system that had drawn her in, led her on and spat her out unwanted.

Everything looks so neat when it's just metal and energy and mathematics, Lennart thought. Maybe that's part of why the Confederation were able to keep fighting so long - mechanical crews cutting down on the problems of command, no egos to soothe, no personal crises to draw down efficiency. Huge numbers of armed droids helped as well, of course. And especially at this precise point, by far the largest of those problems is my own, so I'm in no position to get bitchy, he added to himself.

The customs corvettes were attached to the sweeper line, their high thrust and heavy antifighter weaponry should prove useful to cover and support long-range TIE patrols, but they were very lightly built for confronting warships. They had power and load capacity to spare, but it was unlikely there would be time and personnel available to make any meaningful refit.

He would have to see what could be done for, or if necessary to, Rontaine. She would be difficult to work with, especially for an ex-free trader and freewheeler like Konstantin Vehrec. Probably wasn't her own best friend in that regard.

Still, she almost certainly knew things that could be useful for him to find out. Later, assuming she survived.

'Alert Tarazed Meridian, she's first stage intervention along with the rest of recon line B if this goes badly wrong,' Lennart ordered.

There was a beep from his terminal. Private message; Aleph-3. He decided to deal with it now. 'Your timing's abysmal, we have a situation here. What is it?'

'I have just found out that you have been experimenting at fencing practise - and more besides, if the account I got was accurate.' She sounded annoyed with him.

'Yes, I was. I'm glad you weren't there; it was rather embarrassing. I found out, if that's the term, that actual ability is the coefficient of natural talent and effort invested.'

'Which is why you need an expert there to guide you and push you on,' she said.

'I had one; that was the problem,' Lennart said, not entirely joking.

'And the Force? You called upon it, reached out for it, didn't you?' she said, failing to hide her eagerness.

'Yes, both sides. I called on the ends of the spectrum, reached out to touch them and feel them, heft them and see how they sat in my head, and I don't quite see what all the fuss is about. Under the influence of the light side I found it difficult to distinguish reality from illusion; the dark side simply made it difficult to distinguish friend from foe.'

'Thus clearly proving the superiority of the Dark Side, especially when dealing with politicians,' Aleph-3 bounced back at him.

'The last thing you want, at this precise point, is for me to become power-crazed and attempt to assert my alpha-male personal superiority over my friends, allies and colleagues,' Lennart said, rubbing the bruise on his shoulder.

It was fascinating, to listen to the slightly panicked silence on the com as she tried to think of what she could get away with saying. She should be experiencing some cognitive dissonance about now, he thought. A dozen possibilities danced through her head, ranging from 'Remember I'm first in line when you're stocking your harem' to the copout 'if that be the will of the Force'. She resorted to 'So who else do you think can fill the role? Do you want to be a beta? You have to use the gift you've been given.'

'My gift for finding trouble, or letting trouble find me, has got nothing to do with the Force, and if you'll excuse me,' Lennart said, 'I can hear it calling my name.'

Obdurate's captain's day cabin was a lot smaller than that of a fleet destroyer; it really was a cubbyhole, sandwiched between the base mounts for the ship's sensor domes just aft of the main bridge. It contained a bed, a fresher, and a video wall, and at the moment it contained Karl-Anton Raesene and the pair of ISB agents who had been making his life miserable for the last week.

'I don't understand why you're being so difficult about this,' the senior man said to him. 'You know what we need from you.'

'It was an exercise,' Raesene said, with the sinking feeling that he was speaking an entirely different language whose words were coincidentally the same.

'A drill. It is still duty, is it not? It is still worthy of security oversight, isn't it?' the younger agent said. He had been laying on the menace fairly thickly, fingering the butt of his gun and glaring at people wherever he went.

The crew are afraid of him, Raesene thought. Afraid of the system that he represents, afraid of what he can arrange to have done to them. So afraid that some of them would actively help him do it. They won't stand up to them; I'm on my own.  
Lennart's crew would cheerfully help him murder them, in a similar situation; but who, on board, could I count on to help me do that?

'Is it not, Lieutenant-Commander Raesene?' the senior agent asked.

'It is a special case that doesn't fully apply,' Raesene said, hoping that at some point they would actually start listening.

'How can that be? A violation of doctrine can be nothing other than a violation of doctrine.'

'The navy allows things to happen on exercise which are written up and learned from, but it's not like it is in the ISB or the Army,' Raesene tried to explain.

'I don't understand,' the senior agent said. 'What do you mean?' The junior agent started to say something, the senior agent shushed him. 'Explain, in your own time.'

With the uneasy sense that he was signing his own death warrant, Raesene tried. 'The Starfleet's always had more processing power available to it than the army or the security services. So have Intelligence. That makes it-' he didn't want to risk saying "us"- 'relatively tolerant of change and experiment.'

'How does that translate to being allowed to misbehave on manoeuvres?' the senior agent asked.

'We weren't on manoeuvres; we were in simulation. Half the point of exercises like that is to push the limits of doctrine - all right, underscore why it's usually a better idea.'

'Computer space isn't real? Good luck selling that one to a court,' the junior agent snorted.

'The Starfleet allows simulation exercises to be used as a forum for making mistakes. It's easier and cheaper to get wild ideas out of the system by letting them burn themselves out in virtual space than to risk billion-ton, trillion-credit ships on exercise, or stars forbid actual combat,' Raesene said. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. With twenty-five thousand years of space combat experience to draw on, it was impossible to remember everything, and equally difficult to teach. A lot of advanced tactical training consisted of throwing the candidates into a sim tank and seeing what happened.

'So violations of doctrine on exercise just…don't count?' the younger agent said, baffled. 'That's contrary to Correct Thought.'

'Not according to the Starfleet, it isn't, and that comes from a far higher level than you or me,' Raesene said. 'Captain Lennart could do everything but take a hard copy of the Fleet Instructions, tear it up and set fire to the pieces then piss on the ash, and get away with it - on simulation.'

'Then how do we go about providing him with a copy and a full bladder? I find it difficult to believe that nothing he does can be used against him,' the senior agent said.

'Hold on a moment, here,' Raesene objected. 'I agreed to help you uncover evidence against a renegade; manufacturing it was not in the game plan.'

The senior agent glared at the junior agent, who opened his mouth and shut it again; it didn't matter. What had nearly been said still hung like poison gas in the air.

'Are you beginning to doubt your mission? You've heard the man; you know what manner of maniac you're dealing with. He is unstable, he is unreliable, and regardless of whatever his real achievements are there is no guarantee we will not find him ranged against us tomorrow,' the senior agent said, trying to be charming.

Interesting line in pronouns you have there, Raesene thought. It wasn't about truth any more, or even about flagrant bad examples being set by senior officers who ought to know better; it was about finding some reason, any sufficient excuse, to bring him down.

'I realise that,' Raesene said, knowing he was making a lousy job of acting it. It had been a straightforward choice between moving onward and upward and going nowhere. He had been bribed, plain and simple. Why did they have to complicate it with ideology, simple corruption wasn't enough for them? If it had been a case of "you or me", he would have dropped a senior officer in it in a heartbeat; that was as much navy life as the uniforms and the food. The rebels were the opposition, and your own colleagues were the enemy. That much was business as usual, part of the job. The best clawed their way to the top, and while the connection between political in-fighting and naval war-fighting was weak, it was there; the determined and the devious succeeded in either case.

'The Starfleet, even the sector fleet, would never stand for the security services prosecuting one of their own on a breach of tactical doctrine. Even if it was a legitimate charge, you couldn't bring it without making him so many friends, or at least allies of convenience, in the process that you wouldn't have a hope of making it stick.' And it would also ruin whoever they tried to use as a lever in the process, something of more than a little concern to him.

'Shame,' the senior agent said, almost wistfully. 'I would have liked to meet him, and break him, on his own home ground. If that is not possible then we need another line of attack. Are disciplinary problems too internal to the Starfleet also, or would they provide a useful avenue of approach?'

'I have been hearing squadron scuttlebutt, about things on board that ship. Black Prince's domestic economy is…very strange,' Raesene understated. Most crews that leniently treated would have reacted to it as the softening of control that makes revolution possible and be in a state of anarchy if not mutiny within the month.

'Perhaps someone among his own officers would be prepared to give us what we need?' the junior agent said to the senior.

'Oh, I don't think that would be necessary, would it?' the senior agent said to Raesene. The message was simple; deliver.

'With his reputation, if he was an easy target someone would have indicted him already. The best kind of real evidence I'm in a position to get for you,' Raesene stressed, 'is how he exercises his command - whether he encourages disrespect of the Empire, or other un-Imperial behaviour. The fallout from this exercise should help, and I have a report to write up as part of that.'

'So how did it go?' Mirannon asked.

'I gave the skipper the bloody nose that you wanted me to, boss,' Vilberksohn shook his head. 'He does have real potential, and he could get to be very proficient at this, with practise.'

'Which he doesn't have. I've known him for, what, fifteen years now, ever since we were both on the staff of Tingel Approaches Command. If I didn't give a damn about him, I'd let him go and get killed.'

'So what we're doing is trying to convince him that he doesn't have a kitten's chance in a reactor core following the script, he can't afford to do this the way our VIP expects, and he needs to think of another solution?' Vilberksohn asked.

'Pretty much. Steer him in that direction, get him to realise that he can't do this all on his own,' Mirannon said.

'It just doesn't feel right, boss. I mean, yes, we're trying to do a good thing for him in the long run, but you're just not supposed to pound the snot out of command level officers. On any other ship I would have been crucified for that.'

'On Black Prince, being good at something, even something you're not supposed to, isn't a death sentence. Remember the graffiti outbreak?' Mirannon said, with an evil grin.

'How could I forget, Sir? Lieutenant Ranner's heart attack isn't the sort of thing that passes easily out of mind.'

The Graffiti War of '29 had been a bout of harmless fun, for the most part; it had begun as simple misbehaviour, but Lennart had decided to play with the situation. Some of them, he had decided, had artistic merit. Following a dead regulation grandfathered in from the Republic Starfleet about raising the cultural level of the crew - which he suspected had been copy-and-pasted from the penal code of the time anyway - he had decided to have a selection of pieces framed. In practise, this meant removing the surface that had been painted on and carting it off to the 'gallery' improvised out of the storage bays up in the bow, then replacing the surface.

It took about five seconds for the various branches of the crew to realise that there was no point fouling their own nest, that if you happened to, for instance, daub your symbolic-abstract masterwork over someone else's barrack room hatch and bulkhead, they had all the fun of cutting it loose and replacing it. So sneakiness became the order of the day; midnight painting raids, mysterious malfunctions to the ship's lighting system, spurious alerts, stealth artistry - and all the fun of carving pieces out of walls to cart them off in the morning. Not easy when it happened to be the skin of a pressure vessel, or a major armoured bulkhead.

It was a lot longer before they realised that it was, to all intents and purposes, a team and morale building exercise combined with practical training in damage control.

The only people who were safe were the legion; after one of their AT-ATs got painted dayglo pink with scarlet go faster stripes, they identified the perpetrators and exacted revenge.

A fifty-strong crew room, an entire maintenance section, found their barracks had been redecorated as a rainforest. Everything had been painted, dyed, coated, or inked multiple shades of green - including all fifty of the occupants. While they slept, no warning, no-one noticed.

It had finally come to an end when someone, chief suspect being Mirannon himself, had taken an airbrush to the containment vessel of the main reactor. Whoever it was had painted a fairly good impression of the first nanosecond of a catastrophic breach; the watch officer, Lieutenant Ranner, had taken one look at it and keeled over.

Not because of any special realism, but mainly because of the potential difficulties of dismounting and framing a slice out of the reactor containment shell.

The medics had got to him in time, but that had been the end of it. Most of the pieces of the gallery had been holo'd and the bits recycled, and the graffiti war had been declared over.

'Well, there were no permanent casualties,' Mirannon said. 'The skipper turned a nasty disciplinary incident into a bit of fun and a learning experience; not many others would. Suppose he gets killed as a result of this; that would leave us with Mirhak-Ghulej in charge, officially, wouldn't it?'

'Oh kriff. Sir.'

'Traditionally it's not supposed to be engineering's job to care about what happens topside, but screw that. If we have to protect him from himself, that's the job at hand. If he's appointed you fencing instructor, then you're a part of that.'

'Thank you, Sir. I think.'

The customs corvette emerged from hyperspace a hundred thousand kilometres off the position of the modular cruiser; the rest of Gamma and Epsilon emerged and formated on their leaders, far astern.

'Gamma, Epsilon, with me; follow that corvette.' Aron ordered, urgently. They accelerated after the customs ship, conforming on him; Aron pushed the throttle to its limit, then relaxed it slightly. How would that look, two squadrons of fast fighter-bombers sharking in from a position the cruiser's guns didn't cover, behind an antifighter escort?

It would look like a direct attack...which might not be so bad a thing to fake. Might flush them out.

'CN27AJ19 "The Silent Bugler", this is 721-Ep, Gamma One,' Aron nearly forgot which squadron he belonged to, 'decelerate and await escort.'

He was probably senior to whoever was in charge over there; a light corvette, that was at best a senior lieutenant's command, more likely a lieutenant's. Equivalent, of course.

'Gamma One, you are out of position. Accelerate to join us,' a snappish woman's voice answered him.

'Bugler,' Aron snarled, 'this is a Starfighter Corps squadron leader telling you to kriffing well conform.' Damned customs.

'Gamma One, this is Flight Control.' Franjia's voice. The standard theory was that the voxsystems made everyone sound alike in order to reinforce the group, interchangeable ethic; Black Prince's director crews regarded that as a factor that potentially compromised security, and preferred to use identifiable, verifiable voices, that an expert system could recognise even if the pilot's ears couldn't.  
'Be advised,' she continued, sounding slightly smug, 'that "The Silent Bugler" is the flotilla leader, under the command of a Senior Field Agent whose rank equivalent is O-4, and who has seniority.'

That's all I need, Aron thought.

'Gamma One, take up station on our bow, snap it up,' Rontaine said, calculating time and distance in her head - aiming for a k-k approach, thousand kilometres per second relative velocity at a thousand kilometres cpa.

'CN27AJ19,' Franjia instructed her, 'you are out of position, decelerate and await escort.'

'Thank you, Control,' Aron said. 'Query; are we trying to make this look like a strike? An antifighter light escort to clear away the defending fighters for a bomber approach run?'

'Negative, Gamma One, assume escort stations around "The Silent Bugler."'

Lennart looked at the map display again. 'Working hypotheses? One of three things, I think.'

'The captain of the modular cruiser's a fool, they blundered into the rebels on the way here and they went for it, or?' Brenn asked.

'Think what lunatics we would look if we assumed that ship was in rebel hands, boarded and captured her, and it turned out she was simply being late and stupid all along,' Lennart said. 'Reinforce sector group's case against us pretty effectively, wouldn't it?'

'How do you propose to find out which is which, Sir? Boarding would do it, but-'

'Ideally, either without fuss, or tailored to make them look like the incompetents of the piece. Bearing that in mind, our probe now should have an interesting effect, provided Rontaine understands her footwork well enough to dodge when they do start shooting. Perhaps we should have a heavier unit standing by to, hm, render assistance.'

'Obdurate?' Brenn suggested.

'And what are you going to say, when the court of inquiry asks you why that ship?' Lennart asked him, skipping straight over the intervening step - that Brenn had obviously picked up on his Captain's doubts about her.

'Good record, should be able to cope with a changing situation, large enough and enough engine and tractor power to render assistance,' Brenn said, after a moment's thought.

Lennart nodded. 'Dispatch her, give her a vector consistent drop point at one light second, and alert Tarazed Meridian and Recon line B as first response if it does drop in the pot. There's no indication of a heavy covering party so they should be sufficient, by the time any larger threat manifests we could be there ourselves.'

'Aye, aye, Sir.'

The TaggeCo Modular Cruiser class didn't really have a proper Imperial designation; 'Dromedaries', they were frequently referred to as, for their load carrying capability and their general orneriness. Most of that was a situational problem; as a powerful family with an independent resource base, even the Imperial state couldn't afford to be overly cavalier with them, and they rode that for all it was worth.

Most of the technology on board was copyrighted to the House of Tagge, requiring proprietary tools and licensed technicians to work with. Usually the only different thing about it was that it had been designed to only work properly with proprietary tools and licensed technicians. Most of the changes were awkward ranging to trivial; septagonal nuts and bolts, non-standard pipe diameters, five pronged plugs, female-to-female connectors with interface boards, nonsense like that - but it was easier to temporarily retrain than completely refit. For the system, not the spacers concerned.

They also had no proper names, being part of the logistics train of the sector they usually got alphanumeric designators and nicknames at best. QDX312F9 "Free Gravity For All" had bigger problems than grumbling techs and half a name. Two regiments of Rebel infantry onboard, for a start.

They were not particularly happy either. The operation had already gone spectacularly wrong; their going ahead with what remained of the plan was a stroke of extreme audacity, or idiocy, depending. The troop commander and the first lieutenant of the light carrier that had captured her were watching the Imperial approach develop.

'Well?' the rebel Colonel, a short, wide man with long dark hair and long frizzy beard, asked, 'Are they a threat?'

'Recon fighters. They themselves can do nothing to a ship this size; it's their friends we need to worry about. Looks like we need to start lying earlier than expected.'

'Damn that mercenary nerf-herder, anyway. I knew we should never have trusted him - hero or not, he isn't even a full signed and sworn member of the Alliance; he probably did a pirate's job of recon,' the colonel said.

'I don't think Solo's to blame. From her records, this ship's course track looks as if someone played nullball with the sector map; she blundered through where our information said she was going to pass on the way back.'

The colonel's spine went cold. 'What information?'

'We were acting on a tip-off from our agents within Sector group. Didn't you know?'

'Acting on information received, that led us into this clusterkriff- that doesn't disturb you?' the colonel said.

'If we can bluff our way past them, the mission goes on. No worse than it was going to be anyway.' He nodded to the comtech - using a 'borrowed' Imperial uniform for verisimilitude - to start the plan.

'Customs Craft, this is Dromedary QDX 312F9, you are on a collision course. What is your intention?'

'Dromedary,' Rontaine said, watching it's gun turrets on the image, 'you are well off course. Is your ship fully functional? We will pass close aboard and inspect you for damage sustained.'

No response; on board Free Gravity For All, an ISB officer was being hustled on to the bridge.

'There's a customs cutter out there. Convince them that everything is fine,' the colonel said bluntly.

'What, help you against the Empire? Betray them to the Alliance? Never.' The ISB officer blustered, but his skin was very pale.

'There are a lot of things you'll never do again, after we feed you slowly into one of your own disintegration booths. Cooperate and we release you and your survivors on a backwater outworld, decide not to and we take you and them apart, a molecule at a time. Simple choice.'

'Kriffing rebel scum. How do we - how can I trust you?'

'Because we are Rebel scum, not Imperial scum. If I was still Imperial I'd make all the false promises in the world then fry you up anyway,' the colonel told him. 'You're wasting time. Two seconds. Choose.'

No answer. 'Take him away. Power setting 3, slow broil, for ten minutes-'

'No! No, wait, I'll do it. Just promise it's an outworld with a breathable atmosphere?' the ISB man said.

'Connect him up. To the com circuit, not the kriffing disintegrator,' the colonel shouted at the guards who had misinterpreted and were about to drag their prisoner away.

'Corvette, this is Space Major Overgaard, acting commander.'

'Good name for a Space Major,' Aron said, irrelevantly. 'What does that translate to, anyway?'

'The Starfleet refusing to allow them to use the same rank table, I think,' Franjia told him. 'O-4. Unlikely but not unfeasible for a large auxiliary.' Not the listed commander, either.

'What, another one?' Himself, Rontaine and now this man. 'Why does it have to be based on integers anyway? It'd make more sense to use fractions. Why couldn't I be an O-4.268, for instance?'

'If you don't shut up and keep proper com discipline, I kriffing well will decimalise you, you mathematical illiterate,' Olleyri interrupted.

'Yes, Sir. Sorry Sir.'

'We suffered an, ah, technical malfunction. Power coupling ruptured, fragments of the casing - it was being inspected at the time. Astro-Warden Fertun was among the injured,' Overgaard lied. He didn't have to act too much about that part; the rebels had run Fertun through a drumhead court-martial and thrown him into one of the disintegration booths. He was awaiting execution now. It had not been a hollow threat, and Overgaard did not have to simulate sounding shocked and horrified.

Obdurate materialised out of hyperspace, square on the starboard beam of the Free Gravity For All; Raesene queried the situation, received a copy of the conversation so far. Both the agents were on the bridge as he replayed it; smiled when Aron's part came round, and noted his number.

'Do you know Fertun?' Raesene asked them.

'I had the privilege of vetting him once - we uncovered and defeated a Rebel attempt to compromise him. A very zealous officer.' Which was security service speak for a hanging judge.

'Can we take that ship, or at least withstand her?' the rebel colonel whispered to the first lieutenant, meaning Obdurate.

'Unlikely; she's two sizes larger than a dromedary's guns are designed to keep off. Bluff is still our best weapon.'

'Acknowledged, Dromedary. Do you have a position fix?' Rontaine asked.

'Yes, we had an, uhm, minor nav computer malfunction.' Long pause. 'A glitch in the self-mapping software, apparently the module turned out to be the wrong shape or some such explanation. It's all perfectly in order, we have it recalibrated, we're fine now.'

'Wait one, Dromedary, external inspection under way now,' Rontaine announced; Gamma and Epsilon had finally caught up and reached escort positions, flanks above and below the customs corvette. They were all looking closely at the target - Aron mainly at the gun mounts.

'Gamma One to Epsilon Squadron; do you-' he began, and then realised it was a leading question; he changed it to 'report on the precise thermal status of the Free Gravity For All's weapon systems.'

'Gamma One,' Yatrock - now Epsilon's senior flight leader - reported, 'I have residual heat in the after MTLs. They have definitely been charged recently, high confidence two have been fired.'

'Dromedary,' Rontaine challenged, 'do you-'

'Wait, Customs,' Raesene had a message tightbeamed to the corvette. 'Don't make it a challenge. Let them talk themselves into more trouble,' he said, trying not to think too hard about his own unwelcome guests.

'Free Gravity For All, we have signs of recent weapon activity. Are your systems fully safed?' Rontaine asked, not acknowledging yet another supercilious Starfleet officer.

'The power coupling that blew,' Overgaard replied, 'it was, ah, part of the bridge/computing mesh, it, ah, may have been the source of the surge that caused our malfunction. We found ourselves in an unfamiliar location, after an internal explosion - the after defence section went on alert, thought we were being ambushed. Even fired a couple of shots.'

'Was the responsible officer commended for his promptness?' Rontaine asked.

'Um…' Overgaard stalled. 'Ah, yes, Force Security Special Agent Colomban was noted for his quick thinking, but he also was given the bill for the fuel he burnt off with meaningless fire. He, ah, declared himself bankrupt and committed suicide with a fuel cell over the 1MC. We're all still a little traumatised by it,' Overgaard invented.

'Presumably Third Technician Lister is busy trying to bypass the navicomp now?' Raesene asked.

'What the kriff is that, some sort of recognition code?' the rebel colonel asked Overgaard, who shrugged. 'No change,' the colonel reminded him. 'You're still lying for your life.'

'Of course he is. What, you think the Imperial Security Bureau has no respect for the classics?' Overgaard replied over the com. Which, of course, it usually didn't.

'This is getting less probable by the moment,' Raesene said. 'Are they trying to aim for "so crazy it could only be true?"'

'Who would this 'they' be?' the senior agent asked.

'You really want an explanation? Let's see what security implication you can make out of this; Lennart suspects that ship is in Rebel hands, but has no proof. It may be simple, or at this stage extraordinary, stupidity, it may be some kind of loyalty test on the part of the sector group - or the security services.' And he may suspect that, too, Raesene realised.

'If that is what he suspects, then he should move in on them at once. Better to inconvenience an ally than let an enemy go for want of sufficient thoroughness.' The younger of the two ISB agents said.

'That would involve destroying the ship's engines and weapons - specifically, the fighters hit the MTL turrets and we pound the engine block to prevent their escape. Hundreds of millions of credits' damage at least, and many questions asked if it isn't a rebel trick. If it was an official security service request, we could do it now - provided you're prepared to sign off on it.' Raesene said.

'Just when I think that you are incapable of rendering us any useful assistance, you come up with something sufficiently sneaky to make me think there is perhaps hope for you after all,' the senior agent said.

'In my estimation the ship is in rebel hands, and at least one of her crew is sufficiently alive for the rebels to use him as a mouthpiece. The utterly unbelievable story he is telling may be deliberately intended to raise our suspicions.'

'But you don't want to advise Captain Lennart of that,' Raesene guessed, accurately.

'We allow this situation to play itself out as though we were not here, of course. We will...observe.'

Very cold-blooded, Raesene thought, but had the sense not to say. He had already pushed it far enough.

Customs ships' penetrating scanners were defeatable by special shielding, but that certainly did not invalidate them. What they achieved was mainly to make complicated and expensive measures like smuggling compartments necessary, if the criminal wanted to last long enough at it to make a decent living.

It was estimated that upwards of ten million would-be smugglers a year were indirectly killed by the grey economy because their ships had been incompetently maintained - they had special adaptations that would have cost them their freedom if they had gone to a reputable yard. Probably as many again were directly killed, for reasons of going too far into debt trying to afford the modifications.

Chances were, "The Silent Bugler"'s sensor system had eliminated more lawbreakers than her gun fit. A young and spottily trained bunch, the rebel prize crew had few if any members who really understood how the scanners worked and how to stop them - or why they needed to.

'Command, this is Rontaine - no visible damage, no major ionisation scarring. Hotel load, Life Form Indicator interprets as…her engine and bow sections are undermanned. Skeleton crews. Module section is overmanned - forty-four hundred lifeforms - and indications of recent onboard weapons fire and disintegrator activity.'

Thank you very kriffing much, Aron thought. There was at least a shred of a reason why Rontaine hadn't been offered a Starfleet commission; a tendency to work to the mission regardless of what it cost her crew or her colleagues. That thing's engines had better be on top line, because we are going to have to run for it. Now.

There was a brief crackle of com carrier wave, then nothing.

On the bridge, Overgaard twisted out of the rebel soldiers' grasp and lunged for the microphone. 'Rebels on board, it's a trap, we were ambushed-' he shouted into it.

No effect. The rebel comtech had been a holovid producer before going to the wrong side of the law, and knew all about things like one second delay loops on supposedly live broadcast. He cut Overgaard off, and the two rebel troopers escorting him laid into him with their rifle butts.

'Take him away,' the colonel ordered. 'And, speaking of away, I don't think they bought a word of that. Let's get out of here.'

'Get moving, we'll cover you,' Aron com'd to Rontaine, who felt perfectly comfortable now with putting the corvette into a diving corkscrew away from the belly of the modular cruiser.

The fighters swept up behind it, starbursting out of the way of the ion plume as the ship started to run up to hyperspace initiation. They fish-hook turned behind it to pursue - the inquisition module was one of the heaviest and most power-hungry and slowed the modular cruiser down the most; with it she only pulled about eighteen hundred 'g', slow for a warship. Aron's fighters had a big speed advantage they could use to manoeuvre round it; first thing they did, he detached Gamma C flight to escort the corvette, and ordered the rest out to optimum firing range.

Nineteen fighters, five targets - the single mount MTL's that covered the modular cruiser's stern. They were already spitting fire in the direction of the Obdurate; no real worry there, without spectacular stupidity on his part - leaving the bow bay doors open and shields down would do it - a Demolisher-class frigate was more than capable of soaking up sporadic MTL fire.

She had incriminated herself handily with that, though. Open season.

"The Silent Bugler" 's guns were long-barrel ultralight turbolasers; quick tracking, fast firing, but their weight of shot was calculated for fighters and freighters, not armoured warships or fleet-auxilliary imitations thereof. Rontaine had done her part, didn't need to but decided to fly a slightly curving course away, to give the after pair of turrets a chance to open up on the dromedary, in the process scaring the crap out of Aron.

He was already planning approaches that avoided crossing Obdurate's line of fire; she carried the equivalent of half of one of Black Prince's turrets - the bolt would barely notice him if he got in the way of one of those shot. Raesene was holding fire with the LTL, though, recognising that the only thing they were likely to achieve were friendly casualties.

Rontaine's hail of fire tracked on to the target, standard antifighter procedure, and Aron's fighters scattered.  
'Kriffing customs. Which side are they on? Let's see how they like it,' Gamma-Six, Aron thought.

'If you're still alive to complain, it wasn't that bad. Anybody hit?'

Epsilon Ten had taken a hit, just shielding. Nothing serious. 'Right, designating now; even numbered Gammas,' he laid the pointer on one turret and relayed it to the rest, 'Epsilon A,' point on, repeat for each subformation, 'B, C flights, and odd Gammas with me.'

Six or eight missiles homing on each turret, then. Not killing firepower, but enough to damage and disorient, maybe dismount the tube or destroy the local fire control systems. Epsilon dog-legged their missiles in, steering them to avoid the limited PD; only Aron and his senior flight commander did from Gamma. Nineteen of thirty hit.

Only one of the target turrets actually blew; but it did so in a spectacular flare of rupturing energy bank that kicked the Dromedary down and sideways.

'Kriff, that threw our navigation out. Take five minutes to recalibrate.' The naval lieutenant said, trying to remain calm.

'Which we don't have, with that frigate pounding us,' the colonel roared at him.

'We'd be hopelessly lost-'

'Lost where-are-we is better than lost dead. Do it.'

'She's jumping. Running up to hyperspace entry,' Aron announced.

'Active pinging, give me flood,' Raesene ordered; Obdurate - and the fighters - began to hammer Free Gravity For All with active sensor pulses, aiming to image her exactly enough to get a course prediction worth giving chase on. She flared, almost blindingly bright in the target scopes, and for a moment Aron thought they had hit the reactor, but it was just scan. Then she stretched out and leapt across the light barrier.

'Com, signal Falldess and recon-B to pursue, and get me Doctor Nygma,' Lennart ordered.

The image was different this time; it was an idyllic pastoral landscape. Lennart suspected that in time, the dark clouds would close over it, the storm and the thunder would cause the buildings and the hills to melt and splinter, and it would end in earthquake, volcano and space demons dancing in the fire-blackened streets.

'Ah, the voice of the lord of darkness squonks again. Good afternoon, Captain.'

'I think you know what this is going to be about, Doctor.'

'A notion made a motion, in the direction of my feet; but it had a change of heart, made for a different part, and ended in my head, instead.'

'Have you been administered therapy for your wordplay addiction?' Lennart asked, not seriously.

'What sort of therapy would you consider appropriate?' Nygma asked, and on his image the clouds were now raining acid.

'Being locked in a library with every 'teach yourself' language book ever coded, and not let out until you could pun in every language known to lifekind,' Lennart suggested.

'Ah, aversion treatment. Diversion and reversion treatment as well, depending on whether we have unnatural light. They tried that, plied that, and refried that. I can hoot in Hutt and woot in Wook, drabble in Dug and construe in Cerean, inculpate in Ithorian, an inherently improbable idiom-'

'And babble in Basic, and commit sadistic yet scintillating sabotage on the syntax of Standard. We know,' Lennart said. 'There was actually a reason for contacting you.'

'How depressingly mundane. You don't think you're going to get away that easily, do you?' Nygma cackled slightly.

'No,' Lennart admitted, 'and there are some terrifying simplicities I may need your help to mock, later, but that's a hurdle I'll undermine when I come to it. I want to talk to you about the dromedary "Free Gravity For All." '

'Ah, now there is a name to shovel confusion with,' Nygma said. 'Shall I make wild, random guesses as to what caught your ear?'

'I probably should give you information,' Lennart said.

'Aww. That takes all the fun out of figuring out what's going on,' Nygma said.

'It's already happened. How and why are the interesting questions now.'

'Let me interpret…"oh my grud, it's full of Rebels"- does that sum up the situation?'

'That's more than just Finagle's law, isn't it?' Lennart stated. 'You expected some such-more than that; you knew to expect it. Why?'

'We had to clear the dromedary's path. Like sweeping out the cracks in crazy paving. Which is a very pointless thing; I mean if you waste all the goodness on paving, what are you going to do to lubricate the rest of your life?'

'She was sent on a wild goose chase?' Lennart asked.

'So your plan is to bring down rogue waterfowl by throwing pre-fragmented shrapnel pavements at them? Intriguing but undependable. Which is what you want if you happen to be a goose,' Nygma said.

'I may attempt it in another incarnation. In the mean time, demetaphorise.'

'If time is being that mean to you, you may wish to consider-' Nygma noticed Lennart containing an outburst of temper. 'Yes, "Free Gravity For All" was sent on a long, complicated, roundabout route. She was supposed to arrive late and from an unexpected direction, with older IFF codes. If they wanted to simulate confusion they really should have asked an expert.'

'Wouldn't a real expert in confusion be so confused, no-one would ever realise they were an expert?' Lennart searched for a stab of wit, and found it. It was harder; he was annoyed not as much with Nygma, but with himself. He could feel the Force crowding into his head, getting in the way of clear thought.

'What's code, except simulating confusion? What's language, except piling confusion on confusion until they cancel out and let us grasp the universe?' Nygma declaimed.

'Look, Doctor Nygma, as much as I might want to take the time, we have a running operation. Could you translate to Ordinaryese?'

'Why didn't you say that earlier? The auxilliary's initial orders were for a straight pickup. They were altered by someone, let's call them Alice, who arranged an approach that would give you every reason to be suspicious of them and hopefully overreact. Someone else - are you following this?'

'Someone whom you are going to call Bob meddled next?' Lennart asked.

'Yes, you remember that, then? A second major change ordered the auxiliary to pass by a specific point on the way back to the nearest prison planet, Suorand V; I thought, maybe the starfield is unusually pretty or something, but I checked and it wasn't.  
'So someone lowly placed in Escort Command, person C - Carol - altered the orders again. The point was very specific - only this time "Free Gravity For All", wonderfully tautologous don't you think and yet subtly ironic, passed through there on the way to the rendezvous.'

'Which RV turned out to be with a rebel strike force. So let me get this straight - we have elements within Sector group offering us maximum possible opportunity to make fools if not criminals of ourselves by over-reacting and slagging a friendly unit; a second group, of Rebel spies within Sector, who altered that to arrange for the recapture of their people; and a third group - or individual - who played with both their heads. Carol,' Lennart said, meaning Nygma.

'The beauty of it all is, in the chaos of order, counter-order and disorder, it's going to be impossible for anyone not an expert in confusion to work out exactly who did what when, to whom and why, never mind wherefore, whither and whatnot.'

'The rebels boarded her and captured her, and were in the middle of sanitising her. Still hiding the traces of the operation when squadron elements went after her and found them infrared-handed. Only one problem,' Lennart said.

'This feeds back into that time thing, doesn't it? No wonder you object if your reference frame only lets you manage one problem at once. What would that be?' Nygma asked.

'Once we do catch her, we're going to need another transport to hold all the existing prisoners and the crew of the dromedary. In fact, I think we're going to need two, just in case one gets lost.'


	29. Chapter 29

Tarazed Meridian was a fast ship with a heavy fuel load, likely be able to run down and overmatch anything the Alliance could reasonably have in this sector of space. At least, Falldess had thought so until recently. The damage to her sistership Comarre Meridianargued against that.

As the line punched through hyperspace to the last known position where they were to pick up the trail, she worried about that. Compared to the wide open void out there, what had seemed so much now seemed frighteningly little. Only two ships - her own and the Demolisher-class Guillemot - with HTL mounts, and they would have to deploy independently. Or possibly remain as central reserve? Impossible, she decided.

This was going to be a multiple-trip, jump, whatever they called it, sweep. For them to move to the assistance of any of the smaller craft, it would be impossible to plan that in advance. They would have to make it up as the need arose anyway, so there was no sense fretting about it now.

Blackwood could deploy independently as well; she was fast and well armed enough to look after herself. There was something sinister about the shape of that ship, overlapping and angular compared to the normal bulbous strike cruiser.

Kuruma, the other Strike she had, was of the standard pattern. Then there were two Servator and three Carrack heavy corvettes, last generation and this generation's main screen/reaction unit, and two Bayonet, four Marauder lighter corvettes. Match them up. The Bayonets with the Servators, the Marauders with Kuruma and the three Carracks. That would give her nine little splinters, independent search groups that a well handled MC-80 could catch and crush in detail.

Who was she kidding. A rebel cruiser - to all intents and purposes line destroyer equivalen t- could do that even if they were together, organised and waiting.

So avoid them. A lot easier than it sounded; the size of space and the randomness of unplanned flight left a huge search area. It was unlikely the rebels would do any better looking for their missing prize than the Imperial forces would.

Emergence, and for a brief moment she felt absolute horror as two of the ships, the carrack-class Splenetic and the Marauder VY-466ZZ, emerged frighteningly close to each other.

They managed not to sideswipe, and she controlled her expression- problem encountered and solved, exactly as it was supposed to be, but the thought of what to do to make sure it didn't happen, and what to do about it if it did, sat heavy with her. Responsibility, not a problem, but the techniques of the job, knowing what the right thing to tell them to do was, that was the hard part. Just nerves, woman, she told herself. Calm down or you'll spook the bridge crew.

'Demolisher Obdurate, this is Tarazed Meridian. Do you have a predicted course?' she asked, forgetting for a moment that the com team had to be ordered to connect them.

They routed her through, and Raesene's com chief answered. 'We have-wait one,' Short pause. 'Downloading now.'

Falldess looked at the image in her ship's main navigation tank. If that was the direction it had gone in, then-

'Tarazed Meridian,' the com speaker said - woman's voice - 'This is Black Prince Fighter Direction. Aggregate sensor data from FRS squadron Epsilon indicates this as a likely post-transition course, downloading now.'

Hm, Falldess thought. The details were...detailed. Who to believe was the question. Raesene, who seemed capable enough, or this unknown voice, brisk, confident - not uncommon among fakers.

She watched the plan unfold, a nine-pointed spiral sprint-and-drift, but it was centred on a different direction. Would Lennart really play silly buggers like this? She asked herself, wondering if it was some kind of test. Who would she follow, who did she trust? No, that made no sense. They had been detached from the sector fleet to be assigned to this, and why would he have asked for people he didn't trust?

There were reasons, she thought, but best not to think of them now.

'Lieutenant-Commander Raesene, we seem to have a difference of opinion. My units will follow the plan received from the flag; you will follow your own predictions. Execute.'

Obdurate acknowledged and began to move; a couple of seconds' delay, though - what was happening over there? Slow to begin and quick to execute - was there someone looking over his shoulder? That could do it. Strange.

Com-Scan broke down the plan and transmitted it to the ships of her line; they leapt into hyperspace one by one.

'Lost where-are-we is better than lost dead, you said,' the rebel lieutenant grumbled at the colonel.

'I'm just an old ground-pounder; why didn't you kriffing tell me?' the colonel replied.

Free Gravity For All had tumbled, initiating with a poorly balanced, oversensitive hyper field. The compensators had held the ship together, but it had left a huge, obvious signature behind them, and they had no idea where they were.

'It would have taken too long to explain. Now, we have to work out where we are so we can move again before they come after us, and then another couple of detours before heading for safe harbour and coming up with another plan.'

'How long is that going to take?' the colonel asked.

'Honestly? Don't know. It's not a job you can sweat over, the effort you put in really doesn't make much difference; it either clicks or it doesn't,' the lieutenant said, hoping that was true and he hadn't missed a trick somewhere along the way. Their own sensor capability was not on top line, which meant they couldn't really see trouble coming far enough ahead to run from. Rebel and Imperial forces both hunting for them, what usually happened was that both sides watched each other; rebel speed runs being registered by the empire, and vice versa. Interceptions would be plotted, and usually fail. It was a long, slow dance that only occasionally spiralled down into genuine combat.

The recon pair consisting of HIMS Splenetic - Servator class - and the Marauder VY-466ZZ "I'm So Bad Baby I Don't Care" thought they had something, a sensor touch on a moving ship; probably too small to be the target, but also probably not Imperial. Falldess' decision; pursue. They ran on to the end of their predicted course which gave them a start for the next leg, reoriented and moved back along their line to investigate.

She had given the most likely vector to the ship with the most sensitive detectors, the recon Strike cruiser - Verberor, Lennart called them showing off his grasp of Standard - the Blackwood; lots of contacts, lots of civilian and merchant traffic, but a collection of small distortions riding wide apart that could only be a rebel recon squadron.

Tarazed Meridian made her own re-entry to scan and calibrate for the next leg; just before emergence, there was a small bump.

'What was that? That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?' she asked.

'No, Captain, but it's probably-' her navigator started to say, then noticed her glaring at him.

'If it isn't supposed to happen, then it's not nothing; it's a potential problem, isn't it? Find out what it was and stop it happening again.'

'Yes, Captain, but it was probably external. Overrunning a small object with high relativistic mass could-' for the second time, he was interrupted by her glare.

Just because she hadn't grown up with technology didn't make her a fool. High relativistic mass - that meant fast, didn't it? Frighteningly, damagingly fast.

Like the impactors that had rained down on her world thirty generations ago, and for which no-one had ever been found or brought to account. Small objects.

'Find it.' She snapped out the order. 'If there are more, find them too. Where they came from and where they're going.' This was… unexpected. An age old mystery that carried with it a blood cry for vengeance? Melodramatic in the extreme.

After all, the perpetrators would be thirty generations dead too, and only their descendants left to take vengeance on.

Which was fair enough.

Assuming it wasn't some random rock. Assuming the mission could look after itself. Assuming the Imperial Starfleet wouldn't ream her out, possibly literally, for what amounted to desertion.

There really was no choice to make, she knew at once. All the rationalisations happened afterwards. The thought of what she would be able to say if she went home without investigating it convinced her. The idea that it might be a genuine threat to Imperial security only occurred much later.  
Tarazed Meridian turned and began flooding the space back along her own vector with active sensor pulses. Caution - and emission control - be damned.

The Rebel recon fighters dropped out, reoriented and began to move towards her; evidence that they had some larger ship with full nav capabilities with them. Something for the bigger guns to do, then. Falldess stood looking out, knowing that she couldn't expect to see anything her eyes could make sense of at the speeds and wavebands involved, looking anyway.

Aron's fighters vectored after the rebel recon unit; the rest of the line shuffled to fill the gap. Blackwood moved to chase down her contact. Falldess got the first good scan at her ancient, ancestral enemy that her people had ever had.

There were two ships and a cloud of smaller craft; fighter types, quite why they worked she had never understood, but they identified readily enough. Shovel nosed cylinders, with long pod-tipped cruciform set wings.

The rRasfenoni. A minor species of no great account, until now. Little things with too many limbs, long term - probably native - inhabitants of the sector, handful of worlds, but more likely to rip you off on your fuel bill than ram and board with blaster and space axe. Small time grey-economy merchants. Outposts and franchises and colonies on a lot of worlds.

Their ships were moving fast, up around eighty percent of lightspeed, and the smaller of the two dome-on-dome, blobby ships looked as if it was laying mines.

'Can we catch them?' Falldess asked her navigator, willing the answer to be yes.

'They have too much of a lead,' he shook his head. 'Mechanically yes, tactically no.'

'Then shoot them, shoot them,' she said, trying and failing not to shout. The gunnery officer started to look sceptical. 'What happened to these guns you were boasting of? Interplanetary range, you said. Well?'

'Captain,' Com-scan interrupted, 'we have solid reads on three squadrons of fighters and two ships of heavy corvette or light frigate class. Also four hundred and seventeen smaller, missile-sized objects.'

'Captain, the engagement time would be too short. PD might be able to hit them, but anything heavier couldn't lock on,' the gunnery officer stated, hoping she wasn't going to come up with the first order answer.

If it would take too long to match velocity, almost two hours, then-  
'Microjump ahead of them and shoot them as they go by. Then do it again until they're dead. Converge bursts, flak bursts- every trick you can think of.' Or you will get a new job as a warhead, her tone said.

'Yes, Captain.' There was nothing else to say, really. Imperial discipline did sometimes have its advantages.

Nav groaned; the two ships hadn't reacted, outwardly - it was actually harder to calculate the jump to hyperspace from high velocity, with relativistic mass to factor in, than from low. Their jump would take longer than usual to set up; that gave a window of opportunity, the same window he intended to throw the safety regs out of.

Normally, the computer did the work; he input the parameters and margins. This time, instead of waiting for a full derivation and the officially acceptable margin of safety, he instructed the computer to take the best compromise it could find in a minute's factoring, and overrode the safety interlock entirely.

Her gun crews were all bored and frustrated and keen to finally do what they were supposed to and shoot something. This might not have been what they had in mind, but it would do.

The rest of the line boggled at their flag taking herself out of the pattern, and going off on some lunatic chase to nowhere. Black Princewas informed, in full, in three seconds.

Lennart knew anyway; fighter direction were monitoring the situation.

It might be true, or it might not. Gut instinct, yes. Those fighters had been seen in company with Rebel craft before; he wondered if the rebels had any knowledge about their local ally's genocidally aggressive past. They claimed the moral high ground, after all; it would be politically interesting to tell them about it.

His actual response was to instruct the commander of HIMS Blackwood to take over coordination of the search, and to remind Falldess not to jump directly in front of the cloud of fighters and impactors. That and the forlorn hope, at those speeds, of actually finding evidence or a live prisoner from whom evidence could be extracted.

Tarazed Meridian got the message shortly before going into jump, early. 'Ah, kriff. Didn't allow for that.'

She emerged a light minute ahead of the small formation, well within its manoeuvre cone. Even at point eight of lightspeed, they had enough thrust to move into a head on collision. Which they did.

Falldess felt distinctly like a parrot thinking about it, repeating ideas she was uncomfortably aware she didn't fully understand. She did grasp that the damage they could do to the world the impactors had been aimed at, they could do to her ship.

'Helm, bring weapons to bear. Nav, plot another jump, out of their line of attack this time, if you would be so kind.' Lennart's sarcasm was rubbing off on her. 'Guns, you have your orders, what are you waiting for?'

Fight this pass out, hit them hard enough to forestall their escape - and maybe enough to punch a hole in their screen and get at the ships - and try not to get an extinction level event in the face.

Meridian class did not carry their cousins' strategic bombardment missiles, too small a salvo to be worthwhile in ship to ship. They did mount eight quad fighter-weight point defence lasers, four twin light ions and twenty light turbolasers, and she used them.

Extreme range to begin with, but what was to lose? They sprayed fire across the swarm; the MTLs and HTLs went for the two ships at the heart of it. The small dots, the bombardment missiles, were surprisingly elusive. They had jammers and they were using them collectively, shielding each other. Tarazed Meridian's gun crews were well enough drilled, but they had little real experience; nervous excitement and tension impaired their efficiency. They were shooting at a blur, not a collection of dots - probable loci overlapping into a shifting pink-red kaleidoscope. Doctrine stated odd numbered guns went on to barrage fire, even numbers to active local control to isolate individual targets. Half of them got it wrong to start with. No point correcting. Falldess yelled at her gunnery officer to keep shooting.

The penetrators were purely kinetic; when they were hit, they died unspectacularly, a tiny drop in intensity and shift in the pattern of the jamming. The cloud of plasma usually kept coming.

The fighters and the two ships veered away, maximum deflection angle, and sprayed return fire at the Imperial frigat,; the fighters' large autoblaster setups perfect for high relative speed, high deflection shooting. The ships were armed with heavier weapons - same principle, though. Turboblasters?

High rate of fire, colour spreading from brilliant yellow to standard rebel red, they were trying to weaken the Imperial ship's shields to make it easier for the impactors. The capital guns landed hits faster than the Meridian's heavy lasers were scoring. Their weaponry was primitive bordering on peculiar, but their shielding was standard, maybe heavier than average. Meridian's main guns divided their fire evenly between the two, the larger command unit and the smaller missile carrier; the command ship was five hundred and forty metres broad and basically a shallow dome, with smaller domes piled on top of it, flew rounded side forward, three hundred metres in length. The missile ship was a smaller version of the same.

The missile ship took four MTL hits when it was still half a light minute away. The shields flared but held. It turned side on, minimising target profile, and rolled and hooped through the salvos coming its way. The command frigate trusted to its heavier shielding and replied with two heavy turboblasters hosing down Tarazed Meridian.

The blasters every few seconds strayed and scattered, twitching off target, expecting defensive moves that never came - the Imperial heavy frigate was locked into calculating an escape course before the shower of relativistic missiles reached her.

In theory, they were less effective than the bigger, more powerful Imperial ship's heavy turbolasers - they threw 1.4 teraton bolts at a rough estimate of five bolts per second. Pointless for heavy antiship work, useful corvette killers but most people used smaller, lighter, more efficient LTL for that. In practise, for this kind of full acceleration, high speed fight, they got a lot more energy on target.

Falldess knew there was no point in screaming at her gun crews, but pacing up and down the bridge was no relief either; the flares from outside as her ship was kicked by the stream of shot ate away at her nerves, as well as the shielding.

Finally, finally, forty-five seconds elapsed and twenty-six light seconds apart, one of the HTL impacted on the command frigate. It took it well, at first, but burnt off so much of the shielding that she had to go evasive as well.

Fire advantage shifted decisively to the Imperial side, but they only had thirty more seconds to exercise it in before the wave of planet-killers reached them.

'Concentrate on the command unit. Nav?'

'Fifteen seconds more to calculate, five to turn to bear,' The navigator said, every available bodily appendage crossed.

'I don't think assuming animal form is going to do us much good,' Falldess said, snappishly.

'It seems to work for the AT-AT…oh, that was pretty.' Two HTL shot in quick succession slammed into the rRasfenoni command frigate, blasting through the shields and turning one of her towers of domes into molten fragments.

'All weapons on that ship now. If we hit her hard enough we can take her on the next pass,' Falldess ordered.

'Not possible, no time,' Nav said.

Falldess wanted to fight down to the muzzle - actually she wanted to physically get hold of them and rip them apart; another disadvantage of modern warships: boarding was an order of magnitude more difficult. She knew, though, that they had to keep up this hit and run routine, one jump ahead of the impactor cloud - they had taken down less than forty of them; some planet somewhere was going to suffer.

Only a technological illiterate or a Corellian would even have attempted this. The age old cliché of daring to go further because they didn't know what couldn't be done, that had driven health and safety operatives to the limits of sanity for almost as long.

'Then by the plan, jump,' she reluctantly ordered.

Tarazed Meridian's turrets pivoted to stay on target as the ship banked away, and the range closed to something like reasonable firing distance. Starboard side could still bear; they kept pumping out shot.

They connected with two HTL and five MTL blasts just before transition. The green nova faded, revealed less than half a ship, molten and spewing life pods from what was left.

Just before the leading pair of impactors, covered by collective jamming, reached and smashed into Tarazed Meridian low on her starboard side.

It was a loose, sprawling fight. Simultaneity was the real problem. So many things, happening at once. The rebel and Imperial recon fighter elements, blurring together, trying to outguess each other and come to combat in tardyonic space.

Combat in hyperspace was impossible, for one very good reason; energy density. A turbolaser bolt, or any missile that could be carried in numbers worth using, simply carried too much power over area to move anything like quickly. In most cases, a ship that fired a volley of turbolaser fire at a target on its bow would shoot itself, as it, protected by the hyperdrive field, moved faster than the massively energetic turbolaser bolt would once it left the field.

In theory, minelaying could be done. In practise, forget it. Any random factor would be multiplied by the ratio of tachyonic to bradyonic speed, too. The mines, whatever they were, would scatter so widely that even if the enemy actively cooperated in trying to be hit, they probably couldn't manage it.

Launching mines across the light barrier, that was potentially promising. That might work. Perversely, it was a problem precisely because it wasn't new technology - nothing like the pulse mass spreader had been implemented in at least a thousand years.

The DMR were trying to rediscover how it had originally been done now; they had the physics, but no experience with the technology.

When it was done, it would add more interesting wrinkles to the fundamental problem of pursuit. The Squadron included no interdictor types, because Lennart had very little respect for most of the grav well generator carrying designs in service. The Immobiliser and its predecessor the CC-2200 were both widely considered to be undergunned. Which was, if anything, an overestimate. Both types carried little more than point defence. In fact, strip off the domes and call them a Lancer replacement and it would probably be a better use of either hull.

The Spoliator-I, one of the new so-called "light fleet" destroyer types along with the Arrogant, carried a single interdictor dome in a dorsal hump on a fast-destroyer chassis. That could work, they at least had reasonable speed and firepower, but they were as rare as fluorescent purple Bantha. 851 might be able to get hold of one, but Vineland Sector Group couldn't.

The ultimate solution, as far as Lennart and Mirannon were concerned, was to strip the bow tractor beams and some of the useless deep-storage space, and mount an interdictor dome under the bow of an otherwise conventional Imperator-class.

That was a project for another time. At the moment, Gamma and Epsilon were chasing a gaggle of Rebel fighters, and HIMS Blackwoodsomething that could either be a rebel warship or their target. Tarazed Meridian was still responding to transponder interrogation, but no more detail than that.

The bulk of her must still physically be there, but in what state of damage, and the crew in how deep a state of shock? Tactically, this could be made to work. She could provide the fixed point, the necessary catalyst for a meeting engagement.

Lennart ordered Black Prince's hyperdrives online, and Tarazed Meridian to broadcast a beacon signal with her statement of condition, hamming it up a little. If she really was badly hurt, that was one thing and they would move to cover, but if not, exaggerate. The chances of the Rebels not believing it was a trap were low, but the probability of them moving to investigate was high.

That was one thing Imperial long range fighters were better at; the rebel astromechs gave improved self repair capability, as if that mattered often enough to be worth spending that much mass and volume on it, but they were lousy navigators.

The Starwing had a bounded-area computer; within a given section of space, mapped by the carrying ship - usually a sector - they could hyperspace freely. They could also transfer that to the accompanying Hunters, and did. Aron's two squadron task force arrived well before any Rebel probe.

What they found was a perfect example of the greater spotted Meridian class; four of the clouds of plasma from destroyed impactors had made contact and splashed, scorch marks giving the ship a mottled appearance. She was tumbling slowly, but most of her was still there. One of the hits had been from a relatively light bus-missile, a 'mophead' designed to mop up smaller population centres; thirty impactors, single-digit megaton mostly. That had left bright scar marks, one unlucky impact where a viewport had been hit square on and breached, but nothing serious.

The other one had been a seismic, designed to do geological damage - a single multi-ton, teraton-yield impactor. That could have been potentially lethal, but luck was not always and solely on the side of the rebels. The heavy head had breached the outer skin of the frigate and punched through one of the small craft bays before striking the only material component on the ship capable of taking the impact, the main reactor bulb.

A solid hit would have ruptured the containment vessel and destroyed the frigate, but this had been a glancing blow, at a shallow angle. It had wrenched the bulb out of alignment, leaving the ship mostly intact but running on emergency power. The couplings could be reset, but it was a long job, usually needing a fleet tender. It could be done in the field, but not in combat time.

'Control, Gamma One, we need support here. Tarazed Meridian's in pretty bad shape,' Aron reported.

'Gamma One, Control, papa bear is on his way,' Franjia reassured him. In a way, she wanted to cock this up, make some mistake that would guarantee her being sent back to the squadron, but she couldn't. Not while it was her unit, not while it was him out there. 'Take up defence stations around the Meridian.'

The other problem the Imperial frigate was suffering from was shock damage. The tensors had held the frame of the ship in one piece, but the moving parts - especially the crew - hadn't come off so well. Of just over thirty-two hundred sailors and troops on board, nine hundred had been in compartments that had been breached or where the compensators had failed to completely damp out the shock. The bridge module was relatively intact; there had only been one fatality, A Pit Lieutenant, who had been in mid air at the time and whom the compensators had not reacted fast enough to catch, not in his entirety.

Falldess was the least affected. She had seen, smelt and tasted the effects of black powder cannon fire on wooden hulls and the men inside them before, men ripped apart and splashed across bulkheads. This was, in its own way, more impressive - certainly a more expensively achieved way of getting killed. It mattered, it was impossible to ignore, but she picked up the pieces and kept moving. For her, that was chiefly recalling the rest of the bridge crew to their duty. It was the risk she agreed to take, the bargain she made and the damage she were trying to inflict on the other side.

She was unpleasantly surprised by how badly her own bridge team reacted to it. Her navigator was sitting at his chart board, pecking away at it, dazed one fingered typing. She was about to round on him when she looked round and realised he was one of the few actually trying to function, however badly.  
Her gunnery officer was on his knees retching into a pool of blood, most of which was the pit lieutenant's, some of which was his own drawn by fragments of the pit lieutenant's skeleton. She leant down, grabbed him around the stomach and squeezed.

'That's it, get it out then get back to work. You,' she pointed at the four Stormtroopers guarding the bridge, 'restore order. Anti-nausea pills, a good kick up the arse, and if that doesn't work stun them, throw them out and summon their replacements.'

'Good grief.' she continued, looking around the crew. 'You soft-bellied shower. I might not know what I'm doing but at least I don't stop trying because I'm standing in somebody's guts.'

One of the com-scan team lost it at that point, curled up into a ball and puked. A stormtrooper moved to deal with him.

'At least try and pretend that you're officers of a fighting service, rather than uniformed bully boys who can dish it out but can't take it. Com-Scan, is there anything else out there? Helm, how does she answer?'

'Bridge? Engineering.' The main overhead speaker interrupted her. 'Lost main power uptake, lost no. 2 distribution complex, lost no. 4 flight bay, lost no. 4 life support subcomplex. Surges damped, atmosphere restored. Repair priorities?' The voice was businesslike, straightforward - at last someone who seems to know what they're doing, Falldess thought.

'Com-Scan. Report,' she snapped out.

'We have friendly fighters registering, squadron Hunters, squadron Starwings, wait, they're-'

'Tarazed Meridian, this is Gamma One,' Aron announced. 'We have incoming Rebel fighters, probably strike loaded.' He was looking at the computer predictions of emergence - sensor data mostly from the Starwings. Two to three squadrons, two to three small craft with them.

He argued it with himself for a moment. The fighter pilot in him said, there are barely enough to go round. Don't let those little bitty /ln in on the action.

The responsible side, the squadron leader, wanted to take all the help he could get and bury them in TIE fighters before they had a chance to do much in the way of shooting back.

The argument didn't last long. He was a squadron leader because he was a pilot. 'We'll take them.'

'Systems, shield status?' Falldess asked.

'Still bleeding off heat, loaded and compromised in lower port aft.'

'Good,' Falldess said, with deliberate optimism. 'Launch what fighters can still swim.'

'Yes, Captain - what? Good?'

'We have an obvious weak point, that it would obviously benefit them to strike, so they'll come in predictably,' she said, knowing the flaws in that but vaulting over them for the sake of crew confidence. 'Engineering, what can you give me for the guns?'

'We can give you power for ten teratons per second from the backup reactor. Lights and mediums are good, trickle-charge the heavies.'

'Nav, what does that mean in speed?' she asked.

'We - checking out the steering thrusters now. That power would give us a hundred and sixty 'g', main drive.'

'So,' she tried to remember, 'we would lose a race with an escape pod. A problem, but a containable one, as long as we can turn to bear.'

'So, Group captain, have you had a chance to look over the sector ORBAT yet and decide exactly what to requisition?' Lennart asked, pointedly.

'Not in depth,' Vehrec said, sounding nonchalant.

'Let me guess; it wasn't a look as much as a drool. You know exactly what you want, but have only the haziest recollection of where you saw it, because you never bothered to make notes. If I told you to go shopping for them, what would you come up with?'

'Captain, are you implying my past makes me untrustworthy?' Vehrec said.

'Of course it does. What by the book, die-stamp cloned, procedure-stuffed rear area imitation of an officer would trust a man with your history?' Lennart asked, smiling.  
'On the other hand,' he continued, 'because they don't understand where you're coming from, they won't react to your orders and instructions with energy, won't anticipate fluently, certainly won't go the extra light year for you. There are jobs and orders I could give you, that friction would prevent you from succeeding in. Does that not constitute untrustworthiness?'

'I took an old run-down carrier out of mothballs and brought it to join the fleet. I succeeded in that,' Vehrec said, as aggressively as he dared - pot and kettle, this, considering Lennart's reputation. Which Lennart would have agreed with if he had said so.

'Yes, with an all volunteer crew. That's actually a major point in your favour; they have some enthusiasm and energy already, use it. Mainly, don't be too hasty to shake off the dust of Altyna,' Lennart said.

'Somewhere in the rings of Altyna V, there is an ice fragment with IHTKP etched into the surface. No-one can prove it was me, because handwriting analysis doesn't work when you scribble with laser cannon.'

'How do you think I coped, coming back to this ship after eight years away from the line? My time as an instructor helped me immensely; the twin problems of keeping an unruly bunch of youngsters from getting themselves disciplined - or sat on - by the system, and of bringing out the best in them, the same problems I faced running a crew,' Lennart said.

'Fighter pilots aren't like that, you can't treat them like younglings, you have to let them be a little crazy,' Vehrec said. 'Confidence, yeh, maybe it does go the length of arrogance, is an invaluable force multiplier.'

'Which has been most fighter pilots' stock excuse for the last twenty thousand years. Trust me, the rest of the galaxy has finally managed to catch on,' Lennart said.

'Still true. The point is that you don't teach fighter pilots like you lead them in the field. They hatch; there is a transition. Getting your wings is as big a deal as coming of age. Going to an instructional job from command of a line unit is like being demoted from university lecturer to primary school, and the other way round too.'

'One ship, with seventy-four hundred crew and a power rating of 3E24 watts, carrying a reinforced infantry division. It's not all about the pilots. Spearhead's no use without a shaft behind it, warhead's no use without a launcher,' Lennart warned.

'Yeah, you hammered that one home pretty thoroughly on exercise. I know I'm not a stellarly good ship commander. Never pretended to be. Didn't it nearly work, though?'

'Not really, no,' Lennart pointed out. 'All else taken into account, we're doing Caliphant no favour by asking him to cover your blind spots. He's not ready for something that big. You know how to make an officer grow?'

'Is it the same recipe as for mushrooms?' Vehrec said.

'No wonder we handed you your head,' Lennart bounced back. 'By giving them jobs towards the upper limit of their capability. For junior lieutenants that's damned near everything, so it's easy enough, but a Senior Lieutenant requires a little more careful handling. He'll either be able to cope or he won't, and the size of the job means the odds are against.  
'If he doesn't, there he is. Even if he does, he'll make so many enemies and rivals in the process the next step up is going to get that much harder, he'll have to hack his way to the top. That usually doesn't make a good officer in the long term.'

'I think he can cope,' Vehrec said.

'Then back him with your authority so he doesn't have to mortgage his future and make enemies of most of the crew.  
'As for the fighter complement, we have authority to requisition anything in service with the sector group, or to private- purchase - you really could go shopping. What group composition do you think the situation calls for?' Lennart asked.

'Captain, if you really think I'm juvenile enough to have skipped my homework, for kriff's sake, and not read the tactical circular, you can just come out and say so.'

'Remember what I was saying about friction?' Lennart asked. 'Well, have you?'

There was only one possible answer. 'No.' Just to watch the Captain of the Line react.

Lennart appeared to keep his temper fairly well, at least outwardly, but Vehrec could read the signs. First up was; I will crucify him. Second, can't afford to do that just yet, I need him, but I can let him see the receipt for the wood and the nails. Third, he can't possibly mean that, nobody could be that irresponsible. Fourth; could he?

'I did help write it, though,' Vehrec added.

Time for a little experiment, Lennart thought. Call it public relations. He reached into his pocket, drew out the lightsabre, then thought about where that would go.  
Vehrec's eyes were bugging out badly enough already; he had not anticipated this, not serving with one of Vader's men. I don't need to turn the thing on and wave it at him, Lennart thought, I need to calm him down. I hardly needed to do anything; just the thought of it was enough, all the fear happened on the other end.

'Yes, the authorities know. Yes, it is a red blade. My temper is not quite as controlled as it used to be. I think I can still take a joke- but don't push it too far. The Sweep Line's fighter elements?'

'Ah…QX, we have three conflicting ways to load out,' Vehrec said, trying to concentrate on anything but the black cylinder in Lennart's hand. 'We can emphasise area dominance and control which means loading up heavily on TIE Fighters and Interceptors, tactical strike which would be bomber-heavy, or long range rapid reaction, which would be expensive. With thirty-five squadrons, we could multirole and do all three.'

Lennart shook his head. 'Too much division of effort. Bombers make relatively good recon, they have the sensors. I'm thinking a recon/strike force built around them, with mainly hyper capable cover/intervention forces. What have you got now?'

What, you didn't read the statement of condition? Vehrec thought of saying, decided not to. 'At the moment, we have in flying order three squadrons of standard /ln, two old Assault and one of Avenger, of line-regulation type. Leftover Clone War era types, we can put up two squadrons of Aethersprite, two of V-19 Torrent, three of Nimbus and four of Actis.  
'Training modified, four squadrons of Bomber/IFT, two squadrons of Stingers- light missile TIE/ln- four of other /ln types, one squadron failed Interceptor variants, three mixed aggressor squadrons, three halves Y-wing, one half each PTB-625, Z-95, R-41. That's pretty much it.'

'We raided the remains of both Rebel ships; found quite a few interesting bits and pieces. We have the maintenance parts, tools and manuals for maybe three squadrons of X-wings. More to the point, we can increase your complement of relics with another two Nimbus and four Actis squadrons, and give you a total of six squadrons' worth of booster rings.'

'You had a flight of Advanced/X7 until recently, yes?' Vehrec asked, Lennart nodded. 'You must be fairly well in with Sienar, especially if they let you keep them until you had tested them to destruction. You don't think resorting to wholesale blasts from the past might, well, piss them off royally?'

'No more than using the ones we already have in hand, it was pure politics why they were removed from service in the first place. Torrents are dubious, no FTL. Return the initial trainers, the /ln mods and the aggressors to Altyna, that leaves thirteen squadrons to be drafted in from the sector group. We already have a significant qualitative edge, I'd like to keep that,' Lennart said.

'A qualitative edge over who, exactly? For all that I love the older Kuati designs as pilot's spacecraft, they were almost all bleeding edge. They need top line maintenance teams to keep them in good enough shape to be worth it.  
'If we could transfer the Aethersprites and Torrents to Black Prince, you would make better use of them and they would simplify my problems.'

'I'll take the Aethersprites. Pack the Torrents off to Altyna as well. That'll round the Strike Wing out to full strength, leave you with eight squadrons of short-range sublight fighters, eleven squadrons of hyper capable fighters. If you can get another squadron of Avengers from somewhere, four squadrons of Interceptor if possible and /ln if not, and round up eleven squadrons of Bombers, that gives you decent area coverage, long range recon, and independent strike power,' Lennart decided.

'That's a lot of firepower. One thing, though - who's the target?' Vehrec asked, not sure he was going to like the answer.

'Do you want the menu? If we're outrageously lucky, the rebellion. If we're not, the rebellion and most of the aliens in the sector. If the worst case scenario plays itself out the way I expect it to, you can take that lot and throw in renegade elements of the sector group.

Oh, and I need to borrow one of your shuttles. One not registered to Black Prince, anyway.'

'Yes, Sir- what for?' Vehrec asked.

'Got to see a man about an extermination warrant.'

HIMS Blackwood was the coordination ship for the line now, and it was an interestingly two-edged assignment. She had the best sensor fit, so she spent more time in real space than any of the others, monitoring and keeping overwatch on them; that also made her the most important target. In theory, she was also the ship that had the best chance to spot trouble coming and get out of the way. Kovall enjoyed being on the spot; it was a chance to shine, to show what he and his ship could do.

The rebel fighters that Aron had been chasing had dropped out to realspace, reoriented, and Kovall could now see that they were heading for an attack run on Tarazed Meridian, but the Imperial fighter screen had got there first. That problem seemed in hand. The chase, the captured modular cruiser, was proving perversely hard to find, though. A very bright, obvious initial signature, but that still left about eighty cubic light years as a potential end point, and the sweep would move through and around that area - as well as covering the flanks of it to spot incoming craft.

One of which he had a touch on. The modular cruiser had a lot of people on board, either the compForce security troopers - unlikely - or Rebel infantry, and if they were, that meant they had come from a rebel warship. Like the one he was manoeuvring for drop position on; computers tentatively identified it as a Dreadnaught-class, "heavy cruiser" on the peacetime system, practically speaking actually a medium frigate. That made sense. She had the troop complement to board and take a modular cruiser, which were one of the very few things a dreadnaught could actually catch. Older, slower, clumsier, less well armed than his recon ship but a lot tougher. In a stand-up fight, it would depend on hit rates, how much of the Dread's fire Blackwood could sidestep and vice versa. Kovall had no intent of letting it degenerate that far.

It was moving in a sparse, skeletally open pattern of short jumps that probably meant it was serving as rally point and navigation provider for its fighters, too faint to be seen at this distance. Perfect; it could be hit without its screen in place, unless the rebel captain was running a double bluff. Chance worth taking.

He stopped himself just before giving the order to calculate an interception course. What about the rest of the line, that he was supposed to be coordinating? Responsibility was no fun. He gave the order to calculate, but not yet to initiate. Watched the main plotting board. Guillemot was the most important unit at the moment, the most heavily armed of the line; she had shifted into centre position, waiting to interdict whatever came their way.

Relayed data indicated they had a target; it was dimly, fuzzily visible at the limits of Blackwood's range of clarity. They wouldn't have noticed it unless they had been clued in. It was running muted, not exactly silent but enough to reduce it's visibility. Probably a MC-40 rebel medium frigate.

It was also aiming itself at one of the Carrack-Marauder pairs. That was a target well within their capability. Blackwood was just about a fair match for one, but Guillemot had the heavy turbolasers - the last of their line to do so. Obdurate was far out on the ascendant rim of the search pattern, assuming their target had been able to stabilise her course, unlikely.

Raesene would need time to react, and after all his ship did have a hot reputation, one Guillemot's captain was determined to prove she didn't deserve. Guillemot moved after the Rebel cruiser, intending a double ambush.

A fine point of tactics; to warn the Carrack, or not? Subtractor, and the attendant Marauder-class TC-932GG "Cacophony in Q flat major", could not realistically take on a Rebel medium frigate. But they could serve as bait long enough to keep the reb in place long enough for Guillemot to jump her in her turn. No warning.

The rebel wouldn't have given them any anyway. Her captain, probably not a Mon Cal if behaviour was anything to go by, chose to enter the fight with a manoeuvre that Raesene would have recognised instantly. It was the same bouncing entry he had used when he joined the squadron, splashing off the far side of the light barrier, setting up a false descent/transition signature. Subtractor howled out an alert, and turned to face the entry; distant, but not out of contact-bombardment gun range. Apparently.

Blackwood was monitoring the situation, had time to send a warning before leaping into hyperspace on the pursuit of the Dreadnaught; but there was no time to prepare, and Subtractor would have gone with her own sensor picture anyway.

The Rebel frigate emerged on the far side of her, the side she had focused sensors and shields away from. Cacophony reacted more quickly, turning bow quarter on and starting to scramble her fighters. Spraying LTL fire, too, for what good it would do. The rebel came out of hyperspace with her turrets already approximately laid on, opened fire three seconds after emergence.

Subtractor had been faked out and paid the price; turned to face, just too slowly to matter. She had four turrets each mounting single medium turbolasers, to the –40's six quadruple turrets, three of which could bear. The rebels fired sequentially, three long strings of scarlet pulses, and the Carrack's captain let himself be trapped by the class's reputation for being able to withstand punishment just a little too long.

They were tough ships, for their size; designed as fleet outriders, they had the armour and shielding - once it was focused to bear - to survive single stray HTL shot, but a sustained pounding would bring them down just as it would anything else.

Which was exactly what the Alliance ship commenced to deliver. Collectively outnumbered and outgunned, she had to hit hard and fast. The first few shot hit hull protected only by the tensor field and heat sinks, ripped gaps in the Imperial ship's side. Heavy, redundant compartmentalisation could only achieve so much.

Shields refocused to meet the incoming fire, but backed by damaged, compromised hull they were not fully effective; they could not channel heat away fast enough, the generators started to overload, and bleedthrough did further damage.

Subtractor rolled to present her undamaged side, scrambled her flight of fighters - only /ln, but they could join Cacophony's mixed squadron of /ln and/sa Bombers - if they were in time to matter at all. The Alliance frigate was in the middle of calculating her own next move; knew she would have to move out and the energy expended on Imperial shielding was probably wasted.

That didn't stop her from keeping on pounding, pounding away. Subtractor had more freedom to manoeuvre, but fewer engines and less structural integrity left to do it with. Return fire achieved nothing except to force the rebel to keep shields up. She was too heavily protected for Subtractor to be able to do more than prolong the agony by trying to stave her off with return fire.

The rebel frigate monitored Guillemot's premature, distant emergence; that was time in hand, then. Time to burn down the shielding in one capacitor-straining sustained burst, melting the shield emitters, hammering into the Carrack, smashing open compartment after compartment. Fuel tanks, hyperdrive, quarters, comms and most of sensors, life support - blasted away.

Cacophony's bombers threw themselves at the Rebel, but with jammers up and point defence active, their chances were minimal. They shot off their torpedoes from medium range, semi-guided, relying only on their own sensors, then accelerated to follow them in. They still had their drop chutes and the seismic charges they loaded. The /ln went in with them, for what strafing might do.

Most of the –40's light turbolasers were pointing on as well; the ion cannon lashed out at the torpedoes and the Imperial fighters. Imperial return fire mostly sparked off the turrets; aiming for them, even the shot that leaked through the shields failing to do much to that armour.

The reb's ion cannon fired grid patterns at the incoming torpedo wave, blotting them out as they came. No fratricide, no sympathetic detonations - but of seventy-two fired, twenty made it in to contact.  
Not a kill, nowhere close. The fighters followed, weaving, half-blind in the Rebel frigate's jamming, spraying fire ahead of them; they were actually relatively safe. The rebels knew the /ln were relatively little threat, but the bombers still had unpowered heavy ordnance. They were the target.

The rough rule of thumb was, for an effective attack, the fighters had to outnumber the warship target's point defence weapons at least two to one. Eighteen guns firing at six fighters was not the mathematics of victory.

One of the bombers took an unlucky hit dead on the payload bay, blowing out the failsafes, and the ordnance detonated. One more was hit by enough current to melt a radiator wing, and heat buildup blew it apart. Three were hit and disabled, drifting away ballistically.  
One, the second element leader, was lucky enough to be hit in the empty warhead launcher. Most of the controls were disabled; so was he. The flashes of lightning over him had shorted his life support and left his heart about to arrest. He had enough control left to set his charges to contact detonation; and nudge his bomber into a collision course with the frigate.

The rebels saw it coming, but not in time. It was still a better bet to take the hit than to shift shields towards it and leave themselves open to MTL fire. The ion cannon tried to reach it, but short of detonating the charges, nothing would work, and they weren't that precise. The bomber hit midships on the starboard flank, and the seismics let go.

Four hoop-shaped flashes of light seemed to burst out from the body of the ship, the other half going into the shields, which overloaded locally and left huge molten scars across the Mon cal frigate. No hull breach, but she looked as if she had been branded.

Guillemot finally managed to recalibrate and move in - not long, but under fire, eternity. That was the Alliance frigate's cue. Guillemotbarely had time to point her guns on before the Mon Cal frigate accelerated away to light speed.

It had been a well executed hit and run strike. The bombers sacrificing themselves was all that had saved Subtractor from being pounded into little luminous pieces.

The rebel fighters attacking Tarazed Meridian emerged in two long lines. Slightly reinforced squadrons, fourteen each, one a bomb/attack outfit, two three-strong flights of B-wings, two four strong flights of Y.

The other squadron was something new and different. Two elements of A-wings, covering two elements and two three-strong flights of something or other. They looked like T-wings at first, and Gamma's flight computers marked them as T-wing Mod, same sort of fat angel-fish shape, but Epsilon's threw that idea out, identified them as new and started assembling profiles.  
They were thinner and more angular, and had some sort of S-foil, or at least outrigger, that expanded away from the main hull and seemed to be an etheric rudder and manoeuvre jet assembly; from the colour of their engine flares, they were at peak thrust, accelerating at the Imperial fighters, while the A-wings were at ninety percent. That put their performance about that of an /ln, maybe a little better in a straight line, probably more agile. Shielded, of course. The division of effort was obvious. Starwings after the B- and Y- wings, Hunters after the A's and those peculiar little things, whatever they were.

Behind him, the frigate's manoeuvre thrusters fired, stopping her spin, and the bays opened. Prematurely; it would take them time to sort themselves out and launch, and thinking about it the shock probably hadn't been too kind on the fighters either. Still, Aron didn't quite understand the rebel tactics.

The fighters and bombers were separating, the fighters coming in at high thrust; why? One overrunning, strafing pass, and then they would be clear and the rebel bombers would be hit by Starwings and Hunters both, and their fighters would have to decelerate-and-return well within Tarazed Meridian's point defence envelope. That couldn't possibly be the point; no Rebel squadron leader would ever admit that getting Imperial point defence to fire into a furball was more effective than doing it with their own lasers.

Was it possible that all they had been expecting was /ln, and their game plan was to rush ahead, clear the field for the bombers in one fast pass, then harass and strafe, preventing the Imperial frigate from aligning her shields to take the bombers' torpedoes?

That might have worked. Were those new things - was this more than half experiment, was their chain of command convoluted enough that they were better off doing the wrong thing, sticking to the plan, right away than backing off and doing the right thing? Maybe. Well, they had a backstop now, although how much use this bunch of raw, limp /ln jockeys would be - not much, he thought.

When did you get to be such an elitist? He asked himself. Obviously, when you got put in charge of an elite. Even if Gamma wasn't that good, at least they were good enough to make the selection grade. 'Gamma, missiles. Hit the A-wings, get rid of them, then let's see how well the Alliance's new buzz buggy turns and burns.'

Twelve on four, three missiles each; it was a late, slow, difficult track, the A-wing's jammer difficult to pierce, and the absence of return fire meant that either that didn't have enough missiles to go round, or they were packing torpedoes instead. Obviously not heavyweight torps, because his target's performance was pretty much unimpeded. It opened to full throttle and banked away, maximum divergence of angle initially, then chopped to radical evasion in a twisting, signature-blurring corkscrew, and Aron's ESM warned him that someone was trying to lock lasers on him.

Typical rebel, thought the Force was with him and he didn't need his targeting computer; Aron sidestepped three bursts of closely grouped triple shot, light lasers.

A dogfighter's armament, designed for use against /ln and interceptors, useful but lacking the raw punch of the Hunter's or Starwing's twin heavies. Stay on the A-wing or chase down the new type? What was life without a little novelty?

A close, high-deflection pass then a range-opening test of marksmanship. The Alliance fighter moved to strafe past him, jinking and jigging, not daring to move in too straight a line for too long. Nimble little bastard, Aron thought. The thing's long manoeuvre limbs made it unexpectedly agile; it was built for flying sideways, but its power output wasn't that impressive.

Its rate of fire was, and it did land the first hit on his upper left s-foil. Aron instantly overcorrected, rolling into the hit and found himself almost tumbling; it was a lot less power than he expected. The rebel was probably equally surprised.

Aron rolled out, spun to bear and this time went for the rebel head on. It put one triple bolt in that he actually closed his eyes for, shooting back blind - Kriff, he thought, better not do too much of that or people might start thinking I have the Force. Its shot sparked off his shielding, deflected and absorbed; his heavier guns hit one on the nose, one on the port outrigger, both of them cut through the rebel's shielding to do real damage.

The sensor cluster must be in the nose, there was a complicated flare of burning electronics; the manoeuvre arm ripped off, and the rebel twisted out of control, then retrieved and turned to break away. Aron opened his eyes, triggered a second shot that caught it and exploded it.

'Gamma, this is Gamma One. They're lightweights, you can take them head on. Control, has anyone else come across these things?'

'Flight Control approves of your tactics, Gamma One. Their provisional name is M-wing.' Franjia said. Aron thought of the sharp-nosed central pod, twin outriggers - that made some kind of sense. More than the B-wing, anyway. 'Same idea as the T, a cheap, reliable low-end partner to the A-wing, a step back from the bleeding edge; no missiles, but they may have bombs.'

Stang. That was all they needed. That made the rebel plan make a lot more sense.

Franjia added mischievously, 'Control requests that you ionise-'

'Galactic Spirit, no,' Aron shouted.

'You OK, one?' His senior flight leader asked. Of course he knew that they had taken out a pair of B-wings, and been recaptured from a Rebel light freighter. There were probably still rumours about that bit of funny business.

'Bad experiences with ion cannon,' Aron said. He had been weaving on reflex, looking down at the scanner globe.

Epsilon were doing well, but then they were up against a known, inferior, quantity; one outright loss - Eight, who was in the eight spot now? One of the replacements. Two damaged, as well, but for a score of three B-wings and two Y-wings gone.  
Gamma, not so good. One of the A-wings was dead and two damaged, one withdrawing. Two of the M-wings' blips were gone, but there were four Hunters gone, one apparently by collision. Three drifting Imperial pilots, one of whom was showing up as wounded, needing immediate medical attention. Chances were he wouldn't get it.

Two of the B-wings started to ripple-fire their torp payload from distance, dropping their load at the earliest possible opportunity to get some manoeuvrability back. One of them managed to empty its launchers, and one didn't last that long.

Aron looked for clear space and found it; most of the M- and A-wings were flying backwards now; he wanted to be able to line up on one without being backshot by a B-wing. That would be embarrassing, briefly - firepower was their one good quality. Settle down and aim on; he tried to get a prediction lock on one of the M-wings, but the little sod kept skating around the rim of his gunsight.

Then part three of their problem emerged from hyperspace. The three larger blips, it was a fair relief. Two of them were freakmobiles, examples of a nearly extinct type - the superheavy starfighter. TL-118 StarHammers were bulky and visually chaotic - blocks and bulges and bits smushed together in what could best be described as a lump. Moat of their armament was fighter weight, as per spec, but they had room and power for a lot of customisation. Their main drawback was that they were painfully easy targets. It was doubtful whether they could win a fight with a Starwing one on one, never mind credit for credit and still less ton for ton.

They needed antifighter escort, and that was what the third blip turned out to be. It was an obviously stolen - flameclaw paint job - Customs Frigate, a colossal, titanic forty metres long. It would barely count as a bug on the windshield of a real frigate, but it did have enough speed and enough turrets to threaten a fighter outfit.

The rebel plan suddenly made a lot more sense now; this was the execution squad. The rebel warships must have known that whatever lighter Imperial units they managed to attack, they would have to be extraordinarily lucky to have time to finish off. So hit, run, and send a group of hyper capable bombers as a follow-up team.

They had only gone after the wrong target; instead of hitting a Carrack and Marauder, which they probably could take, they had gone after a heavy frigate with her point defence guns intact. They could be made to pay for that, provided the rest of the rebel group didn't take a hand.


	30. Chapter 30

Blackwood was starting to suspect she had a tiger by the tail. The dreadnaught - now approaching Obdurate's position in apparent willingness to sacrifice herself - was a bit too energetic for comfort. It was possible that she was Vainglorious-class.

Rendili's dreadnaughts were peculiar craft, minimally automated and very poorly centralised. Their multiple subsystems needed that many people; there were real jobs for them, which made them superb school ships.

The Republic Starfleet had put up with them for so long because of that, in part. The stream of raw meat that went into them and trained personnel that came out was the seed of the battlefleet of the future, the assertion of central authority and the rejuvenation of the Republic.

Of course, it hadn't worked out that way, and the Imperial Starfleet was still stuck with the damned things.

The Vainglorious-class was an attempt to rationalise the design into an effective modern combatant, integrating most of the systems and losing most of the crew and as much as possible of the dead weight.

Rendili's official name for the things was 'superDreadnaught'; the Imperial Starfleet's designation owed more to political pressure from Kuat, whose in-house deputy chief designer was supposed to have said, "That's brilliant! I love the way you've managed to put an entire medium frigate into a corset."

The ID files transmitted over from Black Prince with the first tactical circular contained a complete rundown, although for some reason Lennart dropped the 'Vain' and referred to them as Illustris-class.

Their reputation was that of an attempt to gild a white elephant, but if the file was right, she was a bit more heavily armed than that, carrying five full-blown heavy turbolasers. That made her a lot more capable than the common wisdom suggested, a fit match for a Demolisher class frigate - especially as she was making a pretty good effort to play dumb, look like a normal Dreadnaught, and lure the Imperial ship in.

Subtractor was limping away, covered by the Cacophony and two squadrons of fighters from Black Prince; there was nothing heading that way, her survivors - mostly on board the Maraude r- were safe enough, apart from their commander.

Obdurate was moving towards the last transition point of the rebel frigate, willing to accept the fight. Whether that was actually the rebel's intent - Kovall didn't think so. Even if they were arrogant enough to assume they had an edge in skill, it was still too much like a straight fight even for an Illustris. Suicide for a Dreadnaught.

What would be a sensible plan? Hit a few of the scout globe, get the rest of the Imperial line looking after their cripples, make time and room to pull off the rescue. Any actual damage inflicted was a bonus, secondary to the objective.

So, their own lowest visibility assets, hyperdrive fighters, out looking for the modular cruiser, and their larger ships playing tip and run.

The MC-40 was moving in closer to Tarazed Meridian; moving to threaten her, call for a response that would pull the larger Imperial warships away to intercept her before she could attack the crippled line leader.

The Illustris couldn't possibly be intending to play it straight. Raesene didn't expect it to, anyway, which was just as well. He had a pretty good sensor picture, chose his drop point intending to fight a distant engagement.

Avoiding the gun and missile mine field the Rebel frigate had laid.

Lightweight, capacitor-fed ion cannon with barrel lives in the dozens of rounds only, single antiship concussion missiles with a sensor pack and manoeuvre jets attached - the rebel had been expecting a straightforward close quarters drop, ten thousand kilometres, and at that range they would have made a difference.

Both ships turned to bear and opened fire at a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres. Raesene had more room to manoeuvre than the rebel did, as it began to retrieve its mines and fighters.

That held out the promise of an engagement long enough to be decisive, provided there were no more unpleasant surprises. Which there probably would be.

Obdurate began an attack pattern, zig-zagging towards the rebel ship, using her full manoeuvre envelope so the rebel seemed to roll around the rim of the guns' alpha arc.

The MC-40 was still in play; it had jumped close to Tarazed Meridian. It was, Kovall realised, all of a piece. Obdurate was engaged; there were a few tiny sparkles of rebel fighters, that could sweep for the lost mod cruiser, or jump in to threaten Obdurate.

If the Imperial frigate deployed her own fighters, the time it would take to retrieve them would pin her in place. If not, she could be torpedoed on her blind side, or forced to weaken the shields facing the Illustris.

There was a third solution, of course - deploy the fighters for cover then save time by not retrieving them. That was why official doctrine considered the starfighter pilots as expendable for the greater good.

From the imperial point of view, they had a missing cruiser to retrieve, two cripples to protect and two rebel ships to do as much damage to as possible.

It was unlikely that the Illustris-Obdurate duel would last long enough to be decisive for either side; both ships had enough shielding that, at any reasonable kind of hit probability, they would last longer than the situation would give either of them reason to stay.

Unless she encountered spectacular good fortune - and Raesene was trying to think of some way of faking it- it was going to be a long, slow fight.

He was mildly amused when the Rebel came up with a lame-duck ruse before he did. Neither ship was scoring continuous hits, not enough to batter through the shielding; they might have been better off settling into a shallower weave and making the ship a relatively stable firing platform.

He weighed the odds; would the increased hit probabilities on both sides change the fundamental equation - no, he decided, not to the Obdurate's advantage anyway.

He was moderately pleased with the practise his gunners were making, not brilliant but well above average; less pleased with his gunnery officer who was staring at the stream of tracer markers with barely disguised horror at the cost in energy they implied, and the wear and tear on his gun barrels. So were the two ISB men.

'This is...ridiculous. Surely you should have something more to show than this? That's valuable Imperial energy you're pouring away, and enemies of the empire not dying nearly fast enough,' the younger of the two agents snapped.

'Calm down,' the older agent said. 'I'm sure Lieutenant-Commander Raesene isn't deliberately fighting shy.' He said it in a subtly mocking tone, inviting Raesene to overreact in his own defence.

'You're a blasterman, aren't you?' Raesene asked the junior agent.

'I do my duty for the Empire,' the agent said, grumpily, patting his holster. In fact, he had shot a mere two men in the course of his career, although not for want of looking for opportunities.

'Look at it. At any range that won't activate our collision alarms, a starship is a smaller target than a man. They have a lot more relative manoeuvrability than a man on his own feet, and when they do take a hit the shields and armour can ride it out much more easily than a man can take a blaster bolt.

'Space war involves a lot more hanging around waiting, a lot more waste when anything does happen, and a smenge of a lot more low order results than the public thinks it does,' Raesene said, insulting - and intending to insult - the agent by lumping him in under the heading of 'public'.

'And there I was, thinking you were going to draw the obvious analogy with police work,' the senior agent said dryly.

One bolt connected; there was a white flash of partial deflection, then a brilliant blue-white flare from the Illustris' blind-side docking bay; a series of undulating surges in its shields, its engines spasmed randomly, and its forward guns fell silent. Two of the pit officers cheered, and Raesene briefly thought 'got you, you bastard'- before thinking it might be too good to be true.

It was probably - or at least was supposed to be - one of the missile mines or ion cannon misfiring as it was brought in through the shielding, either touched off by the flash of a hit lapping round the frigate or by fluctuations in her own shield setup. It was not particularly improbable that hotwired missiles and cobbled-together guns should be that volatile, but it was remarkably usefully timed.

The senior agent raised an eyebrow and was about to make some smart quip when one of the comtechs interrupted.

'Captain, orders,' the tech said, addressing Lieutenant-Commander Raesene by his courtesy title, something they had been doing more often since the security men came on board.

'Continue the approach run,' Raesene ordered in the mean time, then turned to the tech.

'Sir, it's headed '3 of 10', it's our part of a line manoeuvre order,' the tech explained, and handed him the flimsy.

'I think we may have an interest in this,' the senior agent declared.

'Operations come first,' Raesene said, quickly skimming down it. It wasn't as much an order as a statement of intent.

Maintain contact, it said. Pursue, continue to apply pressure, but take no unnecessary risks, make no headlong rushes on a ship that had already demonstrated an ability to play with minefields. Keep her in place if possible, pursue her if she moves away, but wait for support to make a clean kill of it.

'Guns, step down to 1/10 power. Navigation, I want a plot for a microjump from-' he called up the local area chart; pushed his finger into the holoprojection, just short of the Rebel frigate; again, a light second away on the far side of it. 'Here, to here.'

'Sir? Aye, aye, Sir.'

If it had been him in that position, he would have reeled in most of the warheads, but left them parked on the hangar bay deck.

As soon as the Imperial ship closed in for the kill, roll to unmask, mass missile and crash ion volley combined with the Illustris' main guns firing, and probably the reb MC-40 and whatever strike fighters they could spare jumping in behind him. Raesene made his preparations accordingly.

Aron's part of the same order was numbered 1 of 10, but it was already obsolete.

Lennart wanted to use Tarazed Meridian as the anvil and his own ship as the hammer, lure the MC-40 into trying to attack her and then drop in on them; they were supposed to give the rebels a crumb of success, enough to lead them in - the order was unspecific. Evidently they figured he had enough practise at making up objectives as he went along to cope. More professionally, the situation would be changing rapidly enough that the judgement of the man on the spot would be critical.

Two bastard minutes ago, Aron thought, this would have been feasible. The TIEs from Tarazed Meridian had almost been more of a hindrance than a help, turning an even - too even considering the casualties - fight into a target rich environment for the Rebels and a collision and friendly fire hazard for the Imperials. Epsilon had made relatively short work of the Y's and B's, losing another fighter destroyed and one more damaged, but only five of the fourteen Rebel bombers had made it out, and the torps they had fired off had been relatively easily intercepted.

Gamma had lost one to collision with an /ln, but the rebel fighters had broken off past them, not bothering to decelerate; there had been that one pass, a pursuit and exchange of long range fire, then they had scattered seismics, proton bombs and concussion pods over Tarazed Meridian - most of which had been intercepted, the rest adding a little energy to the shields, not enough to matter.

The M-wings had turned out to be quite capable deadfall bombers, in theory, but they had already made their attack and had it fail by the time it occurred to Aron to simulate real damage as a result.

The superheavies would have made a more credible threat, but they had gone the way of their kind - too big, and far too easy a target. What heavy fighter laser couldn't accomplish, a squirt of LTL fire could. They had fireballed spectacularly from the onboard ordnance - one of the pilots had, amazingly, managed to eject - and the customs frigate, lightly grilled, had ran for it with a flock of concussion missiles in pursuit.

One of Tarazed Meridian's shuttles and an escort flight of /ln were doing retrieval. It was not without incident; one of the drifting rebel pilots had refused to give up and started firing back from his sidearm. It had done nothing to the shuttle itself, but scattering the retrieval team waiting in the open bay.

They shot back at him with handgun fire of their own, the rebel pilot drew something that looked like a grenade; one of the escorting TIE fighters picked him off, and the unstable thermal detonator he had been about to use cooked off.

The shuttle had a scorch mark under its chin now, and the retrieval team had invented a new game; shoot the drifting rebels with anaesthetic darts, and use grappling lines to try to reel them in before they depressurised. It had been a close run thing a couple of times. The fight was over, though, and there was no more ground to give.

Falldess wasn't happy with that. 'That's it, they won't reinforce failure, not if they have enough brains to be dangerous in the first place. Nav, do we have enough power to jump?'

Her navigation officer boggled at her for a moment. That wasn't his job. He looked at the engineering liaison, who shrugged.

'We can power the backup hyperdrive directly,' the tech said, 'drain the capacitors and we can make transition on the main drive.'

'Captain,' nav said, 'We can move slowly, and our combat readiness would not decrease any further, or move quickly and lose all stored power for the guns. I recommend a speed run back to base station at Ghorn II.'

Falldess thought about it for a second. 'Do you really?' she said. 'Flight Control, round up the rest of the swimmers, try to stop the retrieval crew harpooning any of our own, then bring the fighters back on board and prepare to move.'

Blackwood had been sticking to the primary mission, the rest of the line also refusing to be drawn off, or to huddle together for maximum protection; watching the rebel recon fighters move, spotting the holes in the pattern.

Their primary navigation provider was in action and embedded, so they were saving energy. There were also only a handful of them left - too few of them to make a difference.

There, Kovall decided. Slightly out of the main search area, which was almost inevitable. That was the most likely position of their target.

Probe droid? No. Crash the party directly.

Blackwood's viewers blurred with blue-white streaks, her sensor radius contracted as she tried to look back across the light barrier, then bradyonic reality snapped back into place around her as she reentered.

Target acquired. One modular cruiser, unmistakable - the damage made it obvious it was the right one. Blackwood activated her com jammers; the rebel's cries for help went unaided.

That only left the slight technical issue of how to board and recapture a ship with the best part of two regiments of rebel troops on board, with a single company of stormtroopers.

Aron's fighters had been joined by the majority of Alpha and Beta squadrons, and Beta One had taken over tactical command. Just in time to miss all the fun. After all, nothing was due to happen, and all there was to do was fend off any stray, last moment Rebel probing attack, and wait for a tender to retrieve the damaged frigate.

That was what he thought was going to happen, until Tarazed Meridian began to turn and accelerate.

So far, so good - until she continued her turn past any possible approach course for Ghorn II, and locked on to the last known position of the rebel MC-40. Falldess' reasoning was quite straightforward; if the rebels would not come to the bait, then the bait would go to them. Perhaps the rigidity of Imperial discipline had some advantages after all.

Her navigating officer had laid in the intercept course under protest, with one of the stormtroopers keeping him covered, but he had done it and she doubted any of the would challenge her authority now.

The hard part would be preventing them from cringing away from her, keeping them still willing to offer opinions and advice.

The fighter units had been ordered to pursue, and a new line manoeuvre order was issued; Guillemot to jump to join Obdurate, Kurumato move out into the deep operational field, the smaller units of the line to support Blackwood.

The modular cruiser had not quite managed to nail its position down, not precisely enough to plot a clean jump clear, and the arrival of the Imperial ships forced the issue.

'How long is it going to take you to get a safe route out of here?' the colonel asked the navy lieutenant.

'Um…ten minutes.'

'How long is it going to take them to burn through the shields and blow this ship up?' the colonel asked.

'Three minutes?' the lieutenant estimated.

'Two minutes and fifty seconds more calculation buys us how much more safety?'

'More than being shot, but not by much. Our hyperdrive, we were lucky to get here in one piece.'

'Why? There was nothing in the way,' the colonel said.

'Gently curved spacetime from a tachyonic perspective, and gravity gradients being multiplied by transluminal dilation? In a bantha's arse there was nothing in the way.'

The modular cruiser had turned to bring its bow battery on target, and was returning fire. It probably wasn't going to matter. The imperial ships could all focus on it, and any one it concentrated fire on in return would go on to full defensive/evasive routine.

Worse, the larger ships pouring fire into them were too big to be taken down in time. They could nail one or two of the light corvettes, but that was a poor return for an auxiliary cruiser.

'What can we do?' the rebel ground force colonel asked.

'What do we have enough of to do anything with?' the lieutenant said, thinking aloud, trying to jumpstart his own brain. 'Disintegrator booths?'

'Good idea. We could rewire the module as a giant disintegrator effect cluster bomb.' The lieutenant started to smile - then his face fell again as the colonel added, 'Give my combat engineers twenty hours to rig it up.'

'Ground troops,' the lieutenant said. 'Could you board one of them and-' that wasn't especially promising either.

'And do slightly more damage as we go down fighting? Call that plan B. Ah. The prisoners. We could load them into the escape pods, fire them off and use the cloud of drifting Imperials as cover.'

'They're on board now, and they're still shooting at us; if we kick the prisoners out, making them much smaller targets much more likely to actually survive, why would that make the Imp ships stop firing?'

'One hundred seconds to shield failure,' the pit crew tech interrupted, tone almost losing it.

'This was one of their own ships. Are they going to destroy it outright, or just disable and board?' the colonel said. Maybe they would come to him, and if it took long enough, took more than say seven minutes to retake the mod cruiser, that could work.

'They can subtract the other factors, read the hotel load and make a rough estimate of how many people we have on board. Either they don't care about blowing up what they have no reason to think isn't a large number of ISB personnel, or they are going to disable and recapture,' the rebel naval lieutenant guessed.

'Why is that an oddly comforting thought - about the ISB, I mean? I'll get the prisoners into pods, in case we need some chaff.'

The MC-40 had been licking its wounds, bleeding off heat from its scars and hoping its presence would divert lighter Imperial forces towards it and away from the search area.

It had four precalculated paths out - one to move in towards the Imperial heavy frigate, one towards the distant covering force, one towards the Rebel heavy frigate it was supposed to be supporting, one to their best guess as to where the rescue ship had ended up.

They were not expecting to be attacked by a supposedly crippled Imperial warship.

Of the four different things they could do, they chose the fifth. Stay in position and receive the attack.

Tarazed Meridian had gone with her secondary, backup hyperdrive; she had capacitor stored power for the main guns. Her back up reactor gave less power than the Rebel ship's standard setup, so her course of action was obvious.

Emerge as close as possible and pound the rebel ship with what HTL shot she had available, as fast as possible, and then finish the reb off on the MTL. She cut her exit closely enough that the rebel had bow-shock to warn him.

The MC-40 rolled round to present its guns, was on target and shooting five seconds before the Imperial ship had yawed and rolled to open its prime overhead arc. The rebel had no alpha arc; at most, four of its turrets could bear.

They opened up with long strings of ripple fire, powerful bolts quickly cycled, tearing into Tarazed Meridian; flare after flare - the Meridian's shields had taken some shock damage as well. They were not fully effective, loose, transmitting impact through into the hull.

Imperial return fire was more coherent. All six HTL turrets were functional, only four of the MTL; they crashed out together. A last-millisecond swerve from the MC-40 avoided part of the fire pattern, not all.

The brilliant white flare of partial deflection, then a red rimmed white flare from the far side of the lighter Rebel frigate. A power conduit shorting and the flash vapourising the matter nearby, burning a hole through the hull. Impressive.

Tarazed Meridian's electronics suite was not on top line; the gunners were working on a patchwork mix of central and local control, droid input and guesswork. Her jammers were not in good enough shape to stop the rebel frigate calling for help.

The only available help was the third rebel element, the proximate covering force - a Quasar Fire class light carrier.

She was responsible for the kill team and the recon fighters, and could put together an improvised strike package - a handful of Y's and X's, mainly Z-95s and other lightweight clone wars leftovers. In theory. If the Imperial Verberor-class medium frigate Kurumahadn't been given an interception vector by Black Prince's nav teams and re-emerged from hyperspace well within contact range.

Quasar Fire class ships had only one distinguishing feature - their cheapness. Medium-small cargo haulers, they had enough room and payload to operate fighters, but nothing else - no real drive power, no shielding worth the name, defensive weapons that might keep a meteorite or two off with luck.

They were compelled, or condemned, to operate as standoff monitor/retrieval platforms, which meant they had some electronic capability - but not enough to avoid targeting, or to scream for help loud enough to matter. Her fighters had just left, could be called back - but not fast enough to matter.

Kuruma rolled to bring maximum firepower to bear and opened up. The Strike class ship squeezed off four eight-gun salvoes before the rebel ship tried to run for it.

The first salvo went wide. Three shots from the second hit, and the rebel ship's shields flared out and shut down. One shot from the third salvo hit bare metal and found nothing solid enough to shed its energy on - overpenetrated, burning through the fighter bay. The fourth landed two: one smashed into the command module in the ship's bow decapitating her, one aft at one end of the long engine bar.

The rebel ship entered hyperspace, out of control and severely damaged. Kuruma would be credited with a 'probable'.

The Illustris-class medium frigate monitored the demise of the coordination ship and the imminent appearance of a second Demolisher-class frigate. At best, it was going to be a messy fight - at worst, pure loss.

She gave up the pretence, tractor-pushed the missile and ion mines back out of her flight bay and turned to run for hyperspace.

'Nav, shortjump. Now,' Raesene ordered; the navigation team initiated the microhop he had planned, initially to avoid the minefield - now to get ahead of the Illustris and rake it as it surged by accelerating to lightspeed. It was not perfect; about thirty degrees out. A crossing target, still running jammers, shields still up. Too much to expect that.

Obdurate landed three more hits before the medium frigate made it across the light barrier and free; one of them hit an engine mount. That would make life interestingly difficult for them.

Guillemot emerged in the capture area of the minefield. She came in expecting trouble, but not that particular kind of trouble - that cost her several seconds spent reacting rather than acting. The mines took full advantage.

The missiles should have been easy prey for the Imperial frigate's point defence systems - if they were still functional, after the ion cannon bolts had splattered over her.

Raesene shouted at her - com team reflexively opening a channel - 'Obdurate to Guillemot, shut down your LTL, shut them down and safe them, ride out the ion hits then bring them back on line for the missiles - Gunnery, do what you can,' he added to his own weapons team.

The ion mines did, between them, carry enough power to batter through Guillemot's shields. Obdurate's gun team concentrated on the mines to begin with, knock enough of them out and Guillemot would still be able to return fire.

That was the theory, anyway. Guillemot ignored the advice to shut down her light guns, and there were two flashes of secondary damage as overcharged capacitors blew; between the mines Obdurate took out and her own defensive effort, she had just enough firing power to beat back the mine swarm before they knocked down her shields and paralysed her entirely.

The missiles hit next, twenty of them. They were only moderately effective - between jamming and LTL fire, eleven destroyed, eight of those by Obdurate, four missed, five hit. What was left of the shielding was burnt off by the first two; three hits did physical damage. One exploded low and starboard, against workshop and life support complexes; concussion damage and breached compartments. The second hit was against the keel - the frigate's tensor fields absorbed most of that. The third hit was on one of the turrets.

The bluish-white flare of the warhead was eclipsed by a greenish-white flash an eyeblink later, and Raesene thought, kriff, she's going, but that was it.

Beam chambers on the gun rupturing, the flash didn't reach the capacitor bank. The turret was destroyed, and came within an inch - actually five centimetres of blast plating - of taking Guillemot up with her; but close only counts in horseshoes and hypernuclears.

'I thought you said,' the older of the two ISB men asked the Lieutenant-Commander, 'that space combat was less eventful than most people think?'

'It is. One of our medium frigates lost a turret, one of theirs lost a main engine. Both ships are eighty, ninety percent operational. That was a low order result,' Raesene said, so simply and with such transparent honesty that the policemen entirely refused to believe him.

Blackwood was still pounding Free Gravity For All's shielding when the first of the life pods jettisoned. Their simple, automated sensors registered that they were in the vicinity of heavy fire, and their beacons started flashing 'cease fire; we're Imperial.' It played hell with their targeting, the autosystems had to be overridden to allow manual fire; legacy code from the Republic Starfleet, from a time when one wasn't to fire at life pods. Each shot had to be confirmed manually - which only really gave the officers responsible a chance to make mistakes.

Hadn't even Vader's personal ship suffered from the same problem, once? Two officers required to authorise an attack on a pod, who had made the wrong decision by not taking the shot?

Kovall remembered Lennart's words after the exercise. No-one ever yet complained about being scooped up from a drifting life pod - just make sure that you're not likely to join them before you start making retrievals. Fine, but the bastard things were getting in the way.

Black Prince was aware of the problem.

'Com-scan,' Lennart ordered, 'detach Rontaine's customs corvettes to move in and make retrieval.' In response to Brenn's raised eyebrow he added, 'The crews have the experience, the ships have the speed and agility, and the special adaptations, to pull it off.'

'I know that, Captai;, it's the next obvious question that's worrying me,' Brenn asked.

'Why didn't I use them as minesweepers to cover Obdurate and Guillemot?' Lennart asked. Brenn nodded.

'Because the Illustris had time, attention, and light and medium guns to spare to make it prohibitively dangerous for them; the modular cruiser doesn't. A better question,' Lennart said, 'would be why Guillemot didn't co-ordinate her drop point properly and came in on information that was dangerously out of date.'

'Glory hounding? Trying for a minimum distance drop to steal Obdurate's kill? That, or just behind the curve.'

'Not by that much in absolute terms, either. Just enough to be disastrous,' Lennart shook his head. 'At least we get to conduct an inquiry rather than an inquest. I trust our intercept solution is current?'

'Continuously updating,' Brenn confirmed.

'Initiate.'

Black Prince made the jump into hyperspace; a short, almost barrel-roll shaped course, designed to prevent her bow being pointed at the target until four seconds before emergence. That should give just enough warning for the target to have time to say 'oh shit', but not to do anything meaningful about it.

The target was the Rebel MC-40. Their objectives had been fairly straightforward - hit the apparently suicidal Imperial heavy frigate as hard as possible then get out before any of her friends arrived. Their timing was a little out.

Falldess was uncomfortably aware that she had probably made the wrong choice - that the rebel frigate was moving well enough, sidestepping enough of her fire, that it was likely to be a close thing with both ships taking real damage. The strain her ship was under and the damage caused earlier compounded; personnel not at full efficiency, sensors and fire control gear partially bypassed and working on reduced function.

Her first thought on recognising the angular, discoloured shape of the Star Destroyer emerging from hyperspace was one of relief. Then guilt at feeling relieved that he had arrived to support her, and anger - she could do this herself, couldn't she? Followed by a glance round to see how the bridge team were reacting - no-one actually said 'thank kriff for that' but it was pretty clear they felt it. All right, perhaps they had a point. Still, now was not the time to relax.

'Guns? We can use their eyes, can't we?' she said.

Take advantage of their ECM, ESM and fire direction, her gunnery officer silently translated. And the tone had been that of an order.

Black Prince's Fire Direction Centre was generous enough to cut them in on their targeting; but sixty-four overpowered guns against six underpowered was little contest.

Gunnery officers in particular sometimes referred to a ship's powerplant by the per-second yield of the weapons it could energise; it made for a more intuitively graspable result. Tarazed Meridian's secondary could manage ten teratons, a pittance against her primary's two hundred and four.

Mirannon had been busy. Black Prince carried additional secondary reactors and heat-reabsorption systems that took her total power output up to three thousand and eighty.

The rebel medium frigate didn't know the precise details, but 'Star Destroyer' was enough. To realign shields to give themselves some protection, refocus jammers for the same, to give the orders to discontinue action, bring the hyperdrive on line, pick a course and add the running corrections, took seconds.

Long enough for Tarazed Meridian, redlining it, to land two hits.

Long enough for Black Prince to roll to open alpha arc and land a converged sheaf of fifty.

The rebel frigate melted under the impacts, its own power systems distinctly less impressive than the effect of the hits.

'Only seventy-eight percent? Against a target blindsided and at point blank? Wathavrah, you're slipping,' Lennart said, com network routing his words down to gunnery control.

'From a snapshot with cold guns? Anything over fifty percent would be acceptable, Captain, and you know it. The crews had no time to warm up and shoot themselves in at all,' Wathavrah said, gently chiding.

'Well, we can't have all the fun,' Lennart said. 'I need to give the squadron something to do.' Good, he thought about Wathavrah's tone. At least he's not taking this Jedi crap too seriously, either.

'Speaking of which; Com-Scan, put in another request for repair tenders to the Sector fleet. Make sure they get this one acknowledged and dispatched promptly, because our working relationship is going to go very sour shortly afterwards once I start yelling at them about the lack of cover they gave that modular cruiser. That and give me a link to the frigate.'

That done, he said 'Tarazed Meridian, this is Black Prince Actual. Can you manoeuvre under your own power or do you need to be towed back to Ghorn II?'

'Black Prince, this is Tarazed Meridian Actual, we are able to move,' Falldess said.

Right, Lennart thought. No technical details whatsoever and a severe case of the gung-ho's. That's not unprecedented, but also not smart. Why does she want to go looking for more trouble - correction, what further trouble does she want to go looking for?

Of course. 'Falldess, take your ship back to Ghorn II on backup hyperdrive, and hand yourself over to Captain Dordd of the Dynamic for debriefing. That is an order and I expect you to acknowledge. Clear?'

Falldess looked around her bridge crew. Some of them might be willing to follow her, willing to go with her example, but not many, not enough - and those that would were thinking, almost audibly, please don't ask this of me. But dammit, she wanted to hit something, wanted to strangle something. The rRasfenoni. Lennart. Her exec. Find something and blow it up and make it die.

Her ship might take one converged sheaf salvo on fresh shielding, but not two. Not at this range. That was what she was looking at if she went renegade. That wasn't an option, but it hurt having to admit it.

'Acknowledged,' she said, grumpily.

'Listen to me,' Lennart added. 'Assuming that this turns out to be what it seems, and not some other alien species - or political faction of an alien species - trying to incriminate the rRasfenoni, not some Rebel diversionary attack - or Force forfend some kind of Imperial destabilisation/provocation op, not some rogue human element, once I am satisfied that the finger of blame is pointing where it needs to point - then, then they are going to burn.

'What I will not do is draft a hunting license on unanalysed evidence, or on the word of someone who is crazy enough to think about attacking a defended planet in a ship with its main power system shot out.'

Falldess opened her mouth to answer back, then her brain caught up with it. What was she going to say? Advocate roasting them, retributive justice which was fine by her, only on the strength of a moral certainty? Lennart was right. There were any number of ways to run a false flag operation.

He also wasn't hammering it in, letting her work out for herself that it was far too important a call to make on the strength of what they had to go on at present. An eye for an eye and a world for a world - that was what she wanted, but how terrible it would be to be wrong.

Tarazed Meridian turned to enter hyperspace, on course for Ghorn II.

'She saw sense. For a moment I didn't think she would,' Lennart said, with relief.

'Skipper?' one of the com-scan team. 'Message from Blackwood, text transmission, first line starts 'oops'.'

'Oh, kriff,' Lennart sighed. 'Sensor feed?'

'Aren't you supposed to have some kind of precognition thing now?' Brenn asked, while the com-scan team set it up.

'I expect to take some learning and experimentation time to make it fully useful, and at least until then I intend to stick with good old-fashioned cognition. I didn't expect Kovall to screw this up.'

Relayed sensor data depicted what had happened. Rontaine's six customs corvettes had emerged, fanned out and started tractoring in life pods. Free Gravity For All's point defence system had done what it could to discourage them, but none of the corvettes had been seriously damaged.

They had, sensibly, stayed out of the way of the squadron's fire, but had done some shooting of their own. Half-megaton long barrels were fairly accurate, and they had mainly been shooting at the turrets. One of which had fireballed. The modular cruiser had been damaged badly by that, rocked to one side - exposing the module to the salvo coming in, which was intended for the engine complex.

The module had an independent power plant to cover the energy budget of the disintegrator chambers. It had been hit. Being proprietary, none of the rebels had a sufficiently clear idea of how to stabilise it. It had been a rupture, rather than a detonation, but it had been enough to break the modular cruiser's back. Most of the personnel on board were alive - and now considering surrender - but the ship itself was a constructive total loss.

'That takes our tally of rebel prisoners up to eleven thousand, doesn't it?' Lennart stated. It was a rhetorical question.

'Just how badly do you want to piss the sector group off, skipper?' Brenn asked.

'Good point,' Lennart said, forcing himself to calm down. 'I'd probably just start ranting. You make the call. Tell Sector that we need sufficient transport, sufficiently escorted, for eleven thousand rebels now. Tell them that if they get it wrong again, I'll fly to the capital and release them in the Moff's palace grounds. If they screw up sufficiently badly, I'll give the rebels their guns back first.'

'One other thing, Skipper. You could have sent Delta squadron in on the minesweeping job?'

'In theory, I could have,' Lennart agreed. 'In practise, I wanted something out in the deep operational field to follow that Illustris home.'

'Captain? Vidcall, from the Imperial Suite.'

'The one on board this ship, I trust, not the one on Coruscant?' Lennart replied.

'It's Kor Alric and please, Sir, don't even joke about things like that,' the comtech said.

Lennart started to say, 'If you're so scared you won't even poke fun at them from time to time, then the bastards really have ground you down' - but stopped himself just before committing high treason. What kind of thing was that to say about the saviour of the galaxy and his own ultimate boss? Something to say very quietly or ideally not at all, he decided.

'Captain Lennart. I trust you are not too busy to attend on me?' Adannan said, sarcastically.

'We're in the mop up phase of the operation. Between that and the paperwork I should have half an hour or so free,' he said.

'It is not wise of you to take the Force so lightly,' Adannan snarled.

'Really? In a knock-down drag out fight between a cosmic energy web connecting all life and the dead hand of bureaucratic procedure, I know who my money's on,' Lennart quipped.

'Can the dead hand do-' Adannan began, about to Force choke Lennart, then realised that draining the life out of someone, taking their air away…yes, the dead hand of bureaucracy could do that.

'Brenn, you have the conn, Kor Alric, I'll be right up.' Lennart hung up; Brenn wanted to say something, ideally wanted to stop him, but there really wasn't any choice. 'If I'm not back in an hour-'

'Send a search party?' Brenn interrupted.

'No, send a Bomber with antiship torps to blow the suite's viewport out. If I have to deal with him for an hour, by that point I think I'd prefer to take a chance with hard vacuum,' Lennart said.

The Imperial suite was guarded; four stormtroopers, two with carbines and two with flamethrowers. Interesting load. Lennart simply strolled past them into the main chamber of the suite.  
All joking aside, what is my game plan? Lennart asked himself. To survive; but not at any price. I have touched the Force, a grand total of twice; I have an aversion to it that amounts to the pathological, and all of twenty minutes' practise with a lightsabre. Time to start listening to my own objections, and recognise that I am dealing with a man who has been driven mad by his connection to the Cosmic All - and wants me to start howling at the moon with him.

To follow down that path leads to several sorts of possible futures, none of them good. I may be an authoritarian by many standards and a murderer by some, but I can put up a rational, civilised defence for most of the things I've done - and it's the things that you didn't manage to do that hurt the most, anyway. I will not descend to the level of a man who has no reason at all. In either sense.

Adannan was there in his robes, washed and pressed; the classic mad-monk look.  
'Why you?' he began by saying.

'I was in the wrong place at the right time. Destiny's twisted sense of humour, or my own nose for trouble,' Lennart said, deciding not to waste time wondering but instead to play it by ear. 'Who else, you?'

'Captain Lennart, my dear fellow, don't you see how reasonable I'm being?' Adannan said, mockingly, although whether he was mocking Lennart or himself was hard to tell.

'Actually, the fact that you can say that with a straight face scares the crap out of me,' Lennart said, recognising the ground that Adannan was trying to manoeuvre him on to. 'Should I have asked, why me what?'

'If you have to be told, you're not fit to know,' Adannan stated. 'Do you doubt your fitness to wield the Force?'

'Yes,' Lennart said, watching his face carefully. Adannan was not a man that it would be safe to play sabacc with, he decided. There was the danger that he might win. Adannan had been opening himself to the Force for far too long; it took real conscious effort to maintain a state of outward calm, and the more something mattered, the more he let it show. Anger visibly conflicted with relief on his face, then guilt at feeling relief. Then annoyance at being so closely watched.

'The Force flows through all things, even you. You can reach out and direct that flow, you will not reject it and you will not fail to make yourself master of it. I will not permit you to fail,' Adannan said.

'You perhaps would be better off if you did,' Lennart pointed out.

Adannan had to think hard what Lennart might mean, was on the verge of asking, then realised that it wasn't the obvious. 'Why issue orders, when you can command with the power of your mind? Why mess around with public relations stunts and soft leadership, when you can have them jump to your voice as to the crack of a whip?'

'Because,' Lennart decided to give an honest answer just to annoy Adannan, 'on some level, and you don't have to tell me how officially wrong this is, I still think of this ship and her crew as 'us'. Would you whip your own family?'

'Laurentia,' Adannan shouted, calling her to him. He hardly ever used her full name; she entered the room in a state of advanced fear, sure something terrible was about to happen. She looked at Lennart, pleading with him; he had no reason to trust her or to help her, apart from principle, and he wondered if Adannan had primed her to do this.  
If she was an actress of the same calibre as her sister- and Lennart doubted it, but not by much - then she could be faking it, but he didn't think so. She was genuinely terrified.

'Yes, my Lord?' she asked him, voice held level with difficulty.

'Disembowel yourself,' Adannan threw a vibroblade to her. 'Nice and messy, but don't make an immediately terminal job of it, I may want to stitch you back together again later.'

In theory, Lennart had always known that such things were, and lived on the dark side of the Force - and on the dark side of human nature, for that matter. He had studied, was passing familiar with the sociology and the criminology.

Having it happen in front of him shook his composure, but only for a second. He took a deep breath, thought of various gambits and how Adannan would react to them, and said, 'you could just use an inkblot.' Much more calmly than he felt. There, that was the effect of the Force right there - the fact that he didn't jump Adannan and try to beat the sick bastard's head in with the butt end of his own lightsabre.

'You're not even going to try to save her? Interesting that you should immediately think it's all about you,' Adannan said.

Laurentia was sitting there, cross legged, with the blade's edge against her gut, not yet activated.

'From what? From her own lord and master who can do this to her again, any time the mood or the madness takes you? Besides which, I thought you'd be able to come up with a more subtle test case.' As opposed, Lennart decided not to say, to one virtually designed to impress me with the malevolence and waste of the dark side.

'So, Captain Egomaniac, what am I going to do next?' Adannan asked him, gloatingly.

'Depends on me, I expect,' Lennart said, flippantly - which was not what he felt. 'Why should I stop you depriving yourself of one of your small and shrinking band of followers?' Laurentia looked at him, eyes pleading. 'Why interrupt you, when you're making a mistake?' Lennart added.

'The quote is "Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake". Do you think I'm completely ignorant of the military?' Adannan asked him, fishing for a response as they both knew.

Lennart knew he was expected to call Adannan a dilettante who knew just enough to be dangerous, so he didn't.

'For all the brushfire wars, for all the individuals who lost their innocence, the galactic conventional wisdom pretty much was completely ignorant of the military before the Clone Wars - and look what happened. People - people- change, sometimes for the worse, and they learn, sometimes the wrong things.'

'Is that all you have, cliché?' Adannan asked.

'For a situation as stilted, contrived and artificial as this, I don't need more. In what demented way do you imagine I could be even vaguely positively influenced by this?' Lennart shot back. Then cursed himself for an idiot. This was not the right moment to challenge Adannan. Which was why he was trying to make it the necessary moment.

'I don't want you to be,' Adannan said. He was in a state of doubt, himself, uncomfortably aware that Lennart was potentially more powerful than he realised.  
Lennart was a strange one. It was an article of faith among the Jedi that the younger they were taken, the better. It was thought necessary to have the postulants from a very young age, ideally out of the cradle, for two things - so that they grew up with the Force as a basic part of their being, thoroughly familiar with and infused with it from the beginning.

The other side of that principle was that they come to the Force without real life experience, without joys and miseries, loves and hates, dreams, fears and ideals. One cannot be selfish if one does not yet truly have a self. That way, the Jedi considered, lay the dark side. A child should learn the Force as soon as they were old enough to comprehend the instructions they were given, not long after they learned to walk and talk. An older child would not be accepted for training; a child past the age of puberty and its turmoils was more likely to be placed on police surveillance for the rest of their life, or possibly quietly assassinated.

Captain of the Line Jorian Lennart was forty-seven, and his relationship with the Force was basically pathological. He would be an impossible student.

Why did I decide to do this? Adannan asked himself, wishing that he could come up with a more sensible answer than the truth - that he had ignored the potential problems in favour of the mandatory faith in his own abilities. He had followed a lead given to him by, of all the absurdities in the galaxy, a love-struck stormtrooper - that in itself should have been sufficient warning from destiny that things were going to get weird.

He had pursued something that was half a legend and half a scurrilous rumour, chasing power - gone well off reservation in doing so, for which he would be forgiven if he succeeded.

He had found a situation that was more complex and more dangerous than it seemed, and this man, this neophyte of the Force - and veteran commander of one of His Imperial Majesty's star destroyers - in his way. Or was that an excessively depressive way of looking at the situation?

His original plan had been to blackmail Lennart into acting as his apprentice, and use the power of the dark side and the master-apprentice bond to dominate him into doing his bidding. That might still be possible - there had not really been a test of will between them yet, but the outcome was looking less certain.

For a brief moment, Adannan consciously thought, what have I let myself in for? Cursed his luck and wished he was home in bed. He looked at Lennart, and saw that he was evidently thinking the same thing.

'You were right about one thing. I was a medic; trauma surgeon in fact, just going through that phase where the false confidence wears away and I was busy enough, seeing and doing too much, to build real experience and skill. One stoned, spice-headed idiot came in one night to accident and emergency, shouting and bullying, demanding drugs and treatment - I was fed up with the idiots like him, morons whose troubles are of their own making.  
'You see, I was a different person then. This man offended me, offended my then friends and colleagues; assaulted someone whom I…I saw red. He turned on me, and I took him apart. I beat him until I had broken every bone and burst every organ in his body.  
'Then I reeled away out into the night away from the team I was no longer part of, away from their horror and their disbelief, in a worse mental state than he had been, blasted out of my head on blood, adrenalin and the stirrings of the Force. The Inquisitors found me shortly before the police did, and now I am what I have become.  
'So you see,' he visibly came back down to earth, looked Lennart directly in the eye again, 'I run no risk by ordering Ren to open her belly; I can always put her back together again, and the touch of mortality is good for her.'

'I weigh the risks,' Lennart said, slowly, almost meditatively to begin with, 'and at times I have felt very conscious of doing a deal with death, of agreeing to hand over so many of mine in exchange for so many of theirs. I have not yet come out on the short end of the bargain - I do take pride in demanding a very high price for the lives of those he manages to get his bony hands on, and almost always getting it. Never play with the lives of your people, and never give the bastard an inch.'

'Weighing risks? Calculating? Doing deals with death? Very un-Corellian of you,' Adannan said. On one hand it was good that he had managed to get Lennart to open up, to give in to his impulses, but - the situation he had arranged to do it was so reminiscent of his own description of the tipping point that had sent him to the Dark Side - inevitably so. Buried patterns re-emerging, old keys being used to open new doors. With one exception. He, Adannan, was playing the part of the man who had his skull smashed in. Had that been a subconscious challenge to himself?

'Nothing quite as pointless as a half-hearted heretic, is there?' Lennart said. 'I think you're doing this-' he nodded at Laurentia who was sitting there shivering, waiting for confirmation that she was supposed to cut - 'in part as a test of your own fealty to the dark side. To prove to yourself that you can do something so desperately at odds with the man you used to be.' That made more sense. That was, in a way, more comforting. Of course, he couldn't possibly admit it.

The next obvious thing to say - what's wrong with random acts of senseless violence? - would be even more potentially disastrous. Lennart was all too likely to tell him.

Adannan decided to change the subject instead. 'You were a politics student, weren't you?' he asked.

'Philosophy Politics and Economics, with a heavy side order of teenage idiot,' Lennart said. 'I was studying politics, and I was political - Moderate Centrist, but not the dour-leftie typical; we were more the comedy terrorist squad. Evidence uncovered, politicians mocked, ventilation systems spiked and police graffiti'd while you wait.

'One day, after one long, rambling, drunken discussion, I had what you might call an epiphany. The system had been spawning, and marginalizing or buying off, people like us for twenty thousand years. We weren't really doing anything that was remotely new, we were just fooling ourselves into thinking that we were. We were children; simultaneously believers and pranksters, juggling airily with concepts we didn't really understand the weight of, or how much they would hurt when they fell on your head.  
'I decided to change everything. Service, rather than priviledge; mathematical rigour, rather than vague generalisations; discipline rather than anarchy. You can tell how little I knew about the Republic Starfleet at the time,' Lennart, typically, added a punchline.  
'I made a conscious decision, under some subconscious pressures, and I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if I had gone another path - but seldom regretted this one. I think I got a better deal out of my conversion than you did from yours.'

'How so? Adannan asked. 'The power of the Force-'

'The very greatest feats of the Force are only open to the very greatest practitioners. On average, well, how much power does your Force lightning put out? Fifty, sixty kilowatts, hundred maybe? As opposed to a 3082-teraton per second alpha arc.'

'That's external,' Adannan half-shouted. 'The Force belongs to your inner self, it flows out of the very heart of your being, it is a power and a strength and a freedom that does not belong to the outside world, but purely to yourself.' So why was he trying to steal brain-hacking technology and technique from the past? Even if it had been a good question, now was not the time to ask himself. Lennart might be able to hear him thinking.

'You don't think command does?' Lennart said. 'The light side had an excuse for forgetting what normal humanity is capable of - they attributed to the Force qualities that belong to man alone. You don't have that excuse.'

'Consider this,' Adannan changed the subject. 'The political implications of the Force.'

'Commendably honest of you, refusing to spell it out for me. Another inkblot? Hm,' Lennart said. 'The obvious, or the very obvious? Start with the merely stunningly obvious - that the Force is living proof that all men, women, transgender, beings with tri- and quad- phase reproductive cycles, et cetera - all people are not created equal. The fundamental basis of democracy is at best a convenient legal fiction, at worst an outright lie. Only power matters.'

'Yes,' Adannan said, pleased - then Lennart decided to spoil it for him.

'Absolutely none of which is news. The existence of life-forms other than human proved that at the dawn of galactic history. That one man - or one life form - can succeed where another fails was proof of that, before the historical record began. The convenient legal fiction still persists, and I would like you to consider why.'

'Longer than it had any business doing. It was a sign of weakness, not to be able to impose your will - to have to ask for the opinions and gain the consent of others is the mark of a being too weak to be worthy of power,' Adannan said. Declaimed, even.

Lennart decided to meet Adannan head on.  
'To squander the talents and the lives of those who serve is the brand of a being too stupid to deserve power,' he snapped back, and had to consciously centre himself, avoid giving in to a surge of anger and hate - then noticed that Adannan wasn't reacting nearly as badly as he thought he would have. Had that been the point of the exercise? To lure me, Lennart thought, into a situation where I would be tempted to call upon the Force; either allow the dark side to lend me strength, or openly declare my allegiance to the Light - nonexistent, but it wasn't going to look that way on the report, he was sure.

'Look at the results in the flesh; we are both responsible for iterations of the same breed.' He waved an arm at Laurentia. 'Is this your statement of intent? Is this what happens to people who are merely one remove distant from the Force? Am I supposed to admire this wastage, or want to be a part of it?'

'You're angry.' Adannan said, happily.

'I'm disgusted. Shall we make a bet? A measurable, testable bet?' Lennart said, aware that there was a risk - at least two separate risks - involved. This was sailing close to the wind; was it justified? On balance, yes. 'We have started with identical copies, and I have made more out of mine than you have of yours. Fitter, stronger, faster, clearer thinking - any challenge you care to name, Aleph-3 will do better at it than Laurentia.'

Adannan grinned. He could make use of this.

'With one exception,' Lennart added. 'Commiting suicide or any variation thereof.'

'Thereof? You really were about to go into politics, weren't you… I'm impressed. Both by your willingness to trust the entity who got you into this mess in the first place, and your willingness to sacrifice her to buy yourself more time to think.'  
Adannan watched Lennart's reaction - a flash of guilt at that, the rapid multicoloured blur of abstract thought as he considered if it was going to work or not; an instinctive denial, a consideration of whether or not Adannan might be on to something, eventually deciding that he wasn't. He wanted her here because he needed her help. Doing it in such a dangerous and dubious way - what else was to be expected, when dealing with a man like Adannan?

'Well?' he asked, more confidently than he felt.

'This could prove to be entertaining. Send for her.'

The Imperial suite did have one distinct proble:; a severe shortage of furniture. In the sidechambers beside and behind, yes, but in the main audience hall, there was the plinth, the swivel throne, and not much else. Most of it - copies of statuary and a rug - was black or sepia. If ever there was a room that needed the services of a good graffiti artist, Lennart thought.

Amongst other things. Adannan had been pacing up and down, stopped at one point to fondle the still cowering, still cringing Laurentia; how does this constitute a life? Lennart wondered. How is this a worthwhile thing to do, to break somebody down to the point where they are ready to put a knife to their own belly at your say-so?

'A credit for your thoughts, Captain,' Adannan asked him.

'Now you're just trying to confuse me by pretending that you can't read them anyway,' Lennart said. 'Isn't it obvious, or has the Force taken away your ability to guess?'

'I no longer need to guess, with the power of the Force,' Adannan gave the doctrinaire statement, then struggled to hide his amazement as he couldn't read Lennart.

' "Power makes stupid," ' Lennart quoted. 'Before you ask, pre-Republic, one of the minor dictators of Xim's time, who conned, bluffed, charmed and wriggled his way into power with astonishing dexterity and cleverness. Once there he turned his brain off, did everything he had accused the previous leadership of and forgot all the warnings he had left himself, and led his people to complete and utter disaster.'

'So he proved his own argument? How historically convenient of him. Is that why you have established such elaborate mental defences against becoming powerful yourself?' Adannan asked.

'In terms of the Force, maybe,' Lennart agreed. 'In terms of the ability to make things happen and get things done, I'm a medium sized fish. Some out there with more authority and the majority of the galaxy with a lot less.

'What was the point of this?' Lennart said, waving at Laurentia. 'Something about the uses to which power is put?'

'Like you guessed; an inkblot,' Adannan replied. 'You really do think of yourself as the good guy, don't you?'

'I repeat my earlier jibe about cliché. Don't you people have traditions? Any kind of collective memory - at the very least, a record of Great Jedi Hokum of the Past, so you can study avoiding it?'

'I am not,' Adannan snarled, 'a Jedi.'

Lennart decided to take his hypothesis for a walk - that Adannan would accept any behaviour from himself that was basically Sith-like. Pride and arrogance, he could get away with more easily than reason and logic, because that was what pointed down the road that Adannan wanted him to take. It was probably not a good idea to do more than pretend.

'Weren't most of the Sith ex-Jedi? You may not be, but the side you belong to has its origins in renegades and deserters from the light - and do you actually think that's good enough?' he said, in the tone he would have used on a junior lieutenant.

'The Sith and the Jedi have been at each other's throats for thousands of years; we took them perfectly seriously as enemies,' Adannan snapped.

'How you ever managed to take them seriously, I don't know,' Lennart said, more flippantly than he felt - maybe this was the better way? Keep Adannan off balance, baffle him with bullshit? No - take that too far and the feral thing he had encouraged to live in him would emerge, instead of, as it was now, using the still human aspects of him like a puppet.

'Not doing your basic research. Which part of "served through the clone wars" didn't you get? Why do you think I was happy about Order 66?'

'I presumed that you had enough sense not to object to it loudly enough to be overheard,' Adannan said.

'I served as part of the human professional leaven on an otherwise clone crewed ship, under successively three Jedi Generals with two padawan - only one of the five of them I personally would have promoted past junior lieutenant. That chiefly because she was cute.'

'Did you? Did you execute your Jedi General?' Adannan said, suddenly enthusiastic.

'Didn't have to. Second Coruscant did the job for us,' Lennart said, more bleakly - and truthfully - than he had intended to admit. For a moment he feared Adannan would pick up on it, but Force trivia got the better of him.

'Fourth,' Adannan said. 'Exar Kun-'

'That wasn't a battle, that was a jailbreak - specifically a rescue attempt after the failure of the First Battle of Coruscant. Doesn't count.

'Besides which, depending on how many minor scuffles you're prepared to dignify, you could make a claim for there having been dozens of the bastard things,' Lennart pointed out, and was about to go on when Adannan said

'Don't you find it interesting, just how many of the Galaxy's great men down the centuries have belonged to one side or the other? Were they drawn to the Force because they were great - or did they become age-bestriding titans precisely because they had the Force?'

'None of the men and women I met who had the Force were particularly great. Most of them were downright lousy. I'll go further than that; professionally were a doctor; fairly safe bet you put in a lot of time and effort learning to be one. Didn't you look down on those who hadn't served their dues, people who hadn't been through the same trials and toils? Don't you now?'

'Why do you think I am reaching out for every form of greatness I can get my hands on?' Adannan said.

'I don't think that, chiefly because you aren't. I prefer to judge a man by his friends than his enemies; any damn fool can be annoying enough to have noteworthy opposition, you have to put real time and effort into keeping your friends. What have you made of the people who you have asked to work for you, and take risks for you, and believe for you?' Lennart challenged.

'I have made them mine.'

'You've made them less,' Lennart said.

'I suppose you think you have a better alternative?' Adannan asked. Of course he thinks he does, the dark Jedi reminded himself. The odd man out, the licensed fool, the internal renegade.

'I do. So did the Empire, until very recently. The convenient legal fiction; the illusion of consent. Make them think they have a say, that it was their idea, that their hopes and fears - and their pride - are being taken account of. The most efficient exercise of tyranny is in the pretence of democracy - that worked for the Emperor with the Senate, after all.'

'Why do you think He dissolved the Senate?' Adannan asked, trying not to sound too interested. There was an additional opportunity here. Probably Lennart - who was tired, after all, tired and talking far too much - would veer into outright treason which would be another useful hold to have over him. Either that or he would go so far into treason by thought and word that he might prove a useful ally in the larger project.

Lennart was tired, it had been a long day, a long several days, but he was not yet so far gone that he was ready to waltz straight into the trap. Head for it with the intention of employing a little judo, maybe.

'How big is Time? How long should it take to purge the body politic of fifty million worlds, and what were the chances that the senate were ever going to do it for themselves? At least with the college of Moffs, the constitutional mechanisms - all right, administrative mechanisms - exist for greater accountability and responsibility than the sectoral Senators ever accepted.

'There are better ways than having their feet cut off, I expect it'll take four, five generations for the bugs to work their way out of the system,' Lennart said, aware that his line of reasoning was fairly contradictory and wondering which part of it Adannan would pick up on.

'So you did approve of that, then?'

'It was…only explicable in the sense of a move in a political game,' Lennart said. 'I intended to deal with it, with you, the same way I did during the clone wars; gloss over the more disconnected mystic rambling, not look for the logic involved because there usually wasn't any, and try to translate the ravings of the force into feasible operation orders. That turns out to be not quite as feasible as I thought it was going to be.'

Adannan was still deciding where to take that when there was a click of heels from the entranceway - Aleph-3 announcing herself. Iridescent armour, DC-15 with sniper sights slung over her shoulder and holding a flamer, just in case. She took in the situation quickly, wondered whether to open with some kind of quip and decided to play it straight for now.

'Reporting as ordered, Sir.'

'Ah, good. Probably,' Lennart said. 'Kor Alric and I are having a slight disagreement…'

'Captain Lennart has essentially bet your life-' Adannan started,

'-on your own skills and abilities.' Lennart interrupted him.

Aleph-3 noticed her sister was muttering some kind of mantra, lips quivering slightly - in pattern rather than plain fear. I am one of millions, she was chanting, there are many of me, if I fail another will succeed, where I fall another will take my place. Well, the only one of Laurentia's sisters to hand was her.

She stopped herself just before turning to glare at Adannan. Standard drill, she thought. Usual practise for sneaking up on a Jedi in disguise. Think happy thoughts, be content of mind, let your own aggressive impulses build beneath the conscious level, so that it is almost as much a surprise to you as it is to him when you ram the stem of his crystal goblet through his eye…

That had been fun. She could do this, cope with this, whatever it was. Probably.

She wondered whether to ask for an explanation or not. Lennart decided he owed her one anyway.

'Methodological argument,' Lennart said. 'Open tyranny versus the illusion of liberty, all that y'zz.'

'I see. Because unit 6NL-108-554E and myself started out as nearly identical, we make a good test case. Provided you can set up some kind of control condition. How do you intend to take account of the time before I was assigned to this ship, before she was assigned to you?' she asked Adannan.

Adannan decided to ignore that. Somewhere in the back of his head, he was kicking himself for being ignorant enough to have forgotten about control groups - but it wasn't as if this was a fair, or even a real, test.

So what was it, then? Why had he - the bit of his brain that was kicking itself for ignoring experimental procedure put on steel toecaps over the fact that it had been Lennart's idea.

Why had he allowed a man who wasn't exactly friend, wasn't exactly enemy, wasn't really a rival yet, partly all three - why had he let this man invite a moderately capable sniper-scout who specialised in Jedi to the party, and if the careful non-presence outside was anything to go by, bring her friends?

He hadn't actually been thinking, had he? Just feeling. Wanting to embarrass and humiliate, maybe even go some way to breaking, Lennart by putting his girlfriend on the spot.

There was a possible line of attack. Why had Lennart never married? No serious romantic entanglements in his past, no dirt to be dug up there? Worth pursuing. Working on him via her now looked less good an idea than it had sounded.

Stuff it. The Force had led him to this and it would lead him through. Perhaps the Force, too, enjoyed a catfight from time to time - if any part of it came from red-blooded human males, it would.

'Your commander has declared that anything one of your kind habituated to my rule can do, one of you trained under his can do better. His method produces superior human material, he claims. I intend to take him at his word on that,' Adannan said, leering slightly.

'Despite the myriad moral and intellectual challenges that could involve, I presume this actually is going to devolve into sharp pointy things?' she asked Adannan, not without sarcasm.

'Would anything less be a complete test?' he said, smiling nastily.

Aleph-3 looked at her sister and cautioned herself against overconfidence. This probably wasn't going to be as easy as it seemed.

'Backgrounds irrelevant? My unbroken front line and behind-the-lines service against her staff time, and worse? Really just come as you are?' She asked Adannan, wondering why he was letting her get away with this, and what he expected to happen.

'Is life fair? Why should its trials be fair?' Adannan asked - and before he was finished talking, she had thrown, underhand, her flamer at Lennart and shrugged her heavy rifle off her shoulder.

Adannan was still reaching for his lightsabre when she brought the DC-15 arcing up, switched to stun, and put a bolt into Laurentia's chest, just as she was starting to stand and turn to face.

The big gun continued to pivot, coming to a stop pointing on Adannan, and Lennart had managed to turn the flamer right side up, although it would take another second or two for his brain to switch combat modes from 'political' to 'close quarters'.

That was not what I wanted to happen, Adannan thought. 'Point your gun somewhere else.'

'My apologies, Lord Alric. That was reflex,' she said, lowering the muzzle of the heavy rifle.

Could he react fast enough to get them both? Who to go for first, him or her? No, this was not the time for adrenalin. This was a time to drift on the black currents of the Force, to ride and steer events.

'Sudden and brutal. I approve. How good are you at rebuilding a broken personality?' Adannan asked.

Aleph-3 considered her answer carefully. Worst case - assigned to Adannan's retinue. He had the authority to do so; what would stop him? Not wanting her, or needing her to be somewhere else.

Why worst? It was simply duty after all, and that was what she was for, wherever and to whatever it led.

Except in this case - no, not just this. Am I getting picky? Deviant, to the point that I should stick my own head in a blender, if my comrades don't do it for me anyway?

Maybe. Growing, not becoming damaged - although what's the difference? Do personalities break, or do they weather? She resorted to the default option - straightforward fact.

'Basic field medic skills cover shock and psychological trauma, but nothing like the specialist skills I'd need for that.'

'No? Disappointing. Then-perhaps best two out of three?'

He placed a hand on Laurentia's shoulder, what precise power or combination he used Aleph-3 had no time to place, but whatever it was, it worked; she came up off the floor like a synthpanther.

Aleph-3 had time to turn to put the point of her shoulder towards her wild-eyed sister, take the blow; a snapshot might have missed - and if it had hit, what would it have achieved? The two collided and went down in a heap, Aleph-3 making the discovery that her sister was wearing an impact vest. Hmmm.

They rolled over each other, Aleph-3 threw her sister off - in the direction of the door; Lennart had to duck out of the way. Laurentia, or whatever vortex of hate and fear was riding her, landed on her feet and charged again instantly, grabbing for her sister's gun.

Aleph-3 let her sister get the muzzle end, then twisted it up and towards herself and over her shoulder, trying to kick Laurentia's feet out from under her at the same time; Laurentia leapt up and levered herself on the DC-15, kicking with both feet at Aleph-3's stomach.

It didn't work; the armour took the force of the blow. Aleph-3 dropped the gun letting her sister fall with it, and snatched the magazine before Laurentia could get her hands on the trigger.

Laurentia tried to shoot, heard the 'click', and by that time her sister was already jabbing her beneath the ribs.

The light-armoured one doubled over, reeled back, Aleph-3 skipped out of the way expecting her sister to be faking it; Laurentia swung for her sister with the heavy rifle as a club, realised her sister had moved, slowed the move and reversed it to fend her off, tried to twist out of the way.

Aleph-3 kicked for her sister's elbow; the old armour-piercing judo routine, go for the gaps between plates, try to dislocate the joints under them. Successful hit, Laurentia howled and stepped back, swung up one-handed with the butt end of the rifle for Aleph-3's gut, managed to connect.

Aleph-3's armour took almost all the force out of it, but she rocked back slightly. What was the point of this? Her sister had little or no chance of actually winning, unless she did something exceptionally daft. Then what?

Laurentia swung for her sister again, aiming for her head, Aleph-3 grabbed the rifle and twisted it out of her hand but by then her sister was already following it in, aiming for her throat with the point of her elbow. Aleph-3 was already rolling beneath it, and headbutted her sister as they came into close contact.

Their eyes should have been the same colour; instead Laurentia's were - closer to green than blue, faded somehow. How much damage had Adannan done to her?

Never mind that, how much was what she was doing now down to her and how much down to him? In this situation, what constitutes victory?

If I beat Laurentia to the extent that she needs telekinesis rather than any mental influence to hold her up, then - is that a triumph for the power of the Force?

Really? Aleph-3 thought, taking a kick on her hip and sweeping Laurentia's other foot out from under her; Laurentia backward-rolled out of range and came back to her feet, bouncing slightly, eyes still defocused and seething.

Adannan expected to empower Laurentia with the Force so that he would win and either get an admission of such or force Lennart to do something stupid. What did it matter to him that she got beaten to a bloody pulp in the process? As far as he was concerned, he had a spare. No you bloody don't, she thought, wondering if she could get away with going for him directly.

Laurentia was doing her best to avoid giving her sister time to think, with a flying kick that Aleph-3 sidestepped - she landed on one foot and stretched the other into a back kick that Aleph-3 took and rolled with, maintaining the distance between them.

So if he is using the power of the Force, why isn't it more effective?

Lennart was thinking the same thing, except that he had an answer.

Adannan went about this the wrong way, he was thinking. He should have woken her up first, because he was trying to read her muscle memories from her subconscious mind, overboost and apply them against her own alerted and confused conscious. He was trying to do too many things at once for them all to work as planned.

I could do better, Lennart thought - Galactic Spirit prevent me from ever trying.

Aleph-3 decided to break the pattern. She held herself loose, preparing to take the next hit -

'What,' Adannan shouted, 'are you doing?'

He let Laurentia go, she looked around as if surprised to be there, said 'ow' and collapsed. 'I felt it. You slackened. You lost heat. You were intending to throw the fight - why did you want to lose?' he glared at her.

Aleph-3 took a breath and decided to stand her ground. She had got herself into this mess, after all. Might as well see it through. 'If I had pressed my advantage, and won as I had every reason to expect to do,' she emphasised that part, 'what would have changed?'

Adannan looked genuinely surprised by that. Lennart was trying to catch up with her train of thought and get a move ahead, and, infuriating as usual, looked as if he was managing it.

'Not a sacrifice I would have asked of you, if you had bothered to check with me first,' Lennart said.

Adannan rounded on him. 'Explain.'

'If she wins - as was likely - what happens to her sister? More torment, more pain, and maybe a slit belly after all. We, more's the point, remain at loggerheads. If Laurentia won - or whatever was holding her up - then it is a triumph for the Force, and we are all good. She's been trying a lot harder than you have to get me to accept this.'

Aleph-3 spoke up for herself. 'Lord Alric, did you deliberately make things difficult for yourself? I am not capable of wanting anything other than that which it is my duty to make happen - to win would have served no purpose.

'In the larger scheme, I serve the Empire; but it is up to the Empire to decide what it wants from me, is it not? On the more immediate, personal scale - I want to see Captain Lennart become strong in the Force. My pounding the life out of someone empowered by the Force would not have contributed.'

So why did you have to give it away, rock for brains, she didn't say, but thought fairly loudly.

'I expected you to lie,' Adannan said to her.

'Why?' she answered simply. 'Would you respect someone who thinks you're worth manipulating more than someone who tells you what they honestly find things to be?'

'Who told you you were allowed to use your brain?' he said, in surprise.

'I did,' Lennart said, taking responsibility - and not entirely certain why, considering which side she appeared to be on.

'Not entirely true either, Captain. In several situations in which the choice was to think fast enough to get out in one piece or die, you and the chain of command by your will simply forebore to tell me not to,' she pointed out.

'Chopping the logic a little fine, aren't you? Or do you take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of inconvenient truths?' Lennart asked.

'I was bred for the purpose of talking to journalists. What do you think?'

'Probably just as well for the Empire you never did deploy in your intended role,' Lennart said.

Adannan's brain was still playing catchup. Yes, yes, I did make mistakes, he was admitting to himself, I did do things the unnecessarily hard way and laid myself open to failure thereby, and how badly have I misread Lennart himself?

'What about Correct Thought? What about the New Order Party? If you allow your rank and file to think for themselves, how can you be sure that they're going to come up with the right answers?' Adannan asked, fishing.

'Bugger Correct Thought, and all it stands for,' Lennart said, succinctly. This was a curve-ball and no mistake.

'I knew you were a closet Democrat,' Adannan growled at him.

'No. But you should be,' Lennart added, forcefully.

'What?' This was just - Adannan could pick up on the louder fragments of Lennart's surface thoughts, the ones that were actually trying to come out. He couldn't quite make sense of them.

'What is Correct Thought but the subordination of your will to that of the Party? And what is a dark Force user worth, whose will has been broken and subordinated to that of another? You should be a passionate believer in free will - specifically the freedom of your will.'

Aleph-3 was just standing there looking at him in utter bogglement. Adannan wasn't far behind.

'I'm sure you say these things in the hope of making my head explode,' Adannan temporised.

'Why should a simple statement like that make your head explode, unless it's desperately at variance with how things are?' Lennart asked. 'I had hoped we weren't looking at some variation on the cycle of abuse, here.'

Aleph-3 made a noise that could best be described as 'eep'; uncertain whether to laugh or scream. Adannan was wondering what it felt like to have his head explode after all.

Either he knows nothing and is coming at this from a complete outsider's viewpoint, or he knows everything and rejects the established conclusions - and is pretending to the outsider's approach.

'There are only two Sith in the galaxy. The master and the apprentice. The rest of us are acolytes, agents, followers, servants. Obliged to squabble amongst ourselves for crumbs from their table, pay in pain for each little bit of wisdom - from the medical point of view, you're right. This is the cycle of abuse,' Adannan said, recognising that and waiting for Lennart's next idea.

'So what do you actually gain,' Lennart asked, 'by playing it by the rules?'

'Survival. The right to soothe my pain by revelling in the pain of others. Governance over the lesser bricks in the pyramid. Most importantly, enough of their approval to not be dead. I suppose you're going to tell me, you closet democrat, that none of that is worth the sacrifice of pride and independence?' Adannan proclaimed.

'Not exactly democrat, although the demos has some influence…biocrat, maybe. At least when it comes to the Force.'

What Adannan wanted to say was 'for the sake of my brain, spare me.' Not that he could, of course. Not that he could get away with expressing any such sentiment - he had a faint idea of what Lennart meant, but really didn't want him to say it - at least, the parts of him that weren't listening in a mood somewhere between masochism and horrified fascination.

Lennart took Adannan's silence for assent. 'Where does the Force come from? From all living things. So where does the will of the Force come from, if not from the same place?'

Adannan looked down and envied Laurentia her unconsciousness. Where had he lost control of this? When he had allowed Lennart to open his mouth? When he had let a domestic dispute expand into a contest of cosmic conspiracy theories?

'Vox populi, vox forti. The will of the people is the will of the Force; the logic is inescapable, whether you like it or not.

'The death of the republic was so very much like what would have happened without the active involvement of the Force, that the only reasonable conclusion is that the Force was following the influence of the mundane. You're the puppet of the people,' Lennart grinned.

'Chiefly of their negativity, of course,' Lennart continued, 'which was only to be expected in the middle of a time of active revolution, with so much fear in the air and the Light twisted so badly out of shape by its own followers.

'I repeat, the death of the Republic was not only a good but a predictable thing - and there were a lot of sincere Separatists, who believed they not only had a just cause but kept fighting for it long after the Guilds were taken out.

'The Empire, run by the Dark Side of the Force or not, is equally necessary for the Galaxy as a whole, and I do not expect it to be anything other than absolutely hated now - that is the natural outcome of purging twenty-five thousand years of bad decisions and misgovernment.

'Five, six, maybe ten generations from now, the reforms will have shaken themselves out and sheer demographic drift will have resulted in some kind of normalisation, probably under Palpatine's chosen successor-'

'You know?' Adannan asked, wobbling under yet another twist.

'I would not expect any man to achieve as much as His Majesty has done, in such times and in the face of such opposition, without being a lot more ruthless and devious than his public image ever was. Accordingly, he is hiding his true nature, and in a government full of dark Force users, what else could he be and remain top dog? It was obvious.'

'Aren't you offended? Outraged, at having been manipulated? It was Sidious - Palpatine - who was pulling the Separatist's strings as well. The man made fools of an entire galaxy,' Adannan said, confusedly reverting to one of his earlier plans.

'I would be very surprised if a criminal secret society that had been outlawed and nearly hounded to extinction wasn't at least trying to play both sides against each other,' Lennart pointed out. 'Besides, in a civil war, what do you expect? After millennia of neglect of the governmental machinery, centuries of abuse, enough nerf-barrelling to fill Centrepoint, somnambulent bureaucracy who elevated indifference to an art form, toothless watchdogs and blind oversight - regardless of how the manipulations went and who did what to whom, the Sith did not kill the Republic. The most they really did was assist it to commit suicide, and in that I would say, again, the dark side actually served the long term if not near term good.'

Adannan stood up and collected himself. He was shaking slightly. 'How dare you,' he said with as much menace as he could muster, 'accuse me of being on the side of good.'

Lennart just waited; Adannan wobbled slightly, collapsed back down on to his bed. 'Enough. If I continue to listen to you any longer my resolution may be compromised.' He said, glaring at Lennart and trying to dare him to contradict - but there was a weakness in his eyes that Lennart decided to…not exactly exploit, just take advantage.

'Is that a resolution to be or a resolution to do? We have unfinished business and anther tactical option I want to explore. A unit of the squadron found evidence that the rebels' local allies were involved in the past, and are involved now, with relativistic-bombing their neighbours.'

Adannan didn't even react. Lennart continued, 'Murder on a scale not far removed from genocide, and very far from anything that could conceivably pass as the moral high ground. We can use that.'

'What is it that you actually want to do?' Adannan asked, and suspected he was going to regret it.

'Play with their heads. Let the Alliance know we have the evidence, then watch them scramble as they try to deny it. Try to arrange fallout between them, at least force them to choose between defending two targets, at best actually get them shooting each other. I can make that happen.'

'Go. Just go,' Adannan said.

Lennart turned, walked out, Aleph-3 fell in step behind him. Hunter team Omega-17-Blue was drawn up in rank in front of him, arms at the present; as he left the chamber, they came up into the general salute.

Lennart returned it, and said 'How did you decide whether to shoot me or salute me, flip a coin?'

'It is clear that, once you have explored your own abilities, you will be the greater Sith,' Aleph-One said. 'A question, Sir; how much of what you said to Adannan did you actually believe?'

'Not much, to begin with. Conspiracy theories and random thoughts. Worth thinking about though, isn't it? Oh, and I need to borrow someone who can shoot and pass for a civilian.'

Short moment of silence, then Aleph-3 said, 'Well, the least you can do is give me my flamethrower back.'

Adannan was still sitting there, brain seething, when the metal-faced woman came in. She stood at ease, awaiting her instructions. I maimed her and she serves me, he thought, because she is too terrified - and too badly damaged - to contemplate the alternative. He waved at Laurentia.

'She saved you,' from me, he didn't have to say, 'your turn to return the favour. Nurse her. Banaar,' he raised his voice to call his other aide, 'that fool who keeps trying to get in touch, the executive officer? Find him and send him to me.'

'What I don't understand, Skipper, is why you're doing this yourself. Send a probe droid. Send a junior lieutenant; they're almost as expendable. Why stick your own head into the acklay's mouth?' Brenn asked, worried. They were in the day cabin, and Lennart was shuffling through his closet looking for something that could pass for civilian clothes, and finding the situation rather funny.

I go out of my way to cultivate a reputation as a scruffy bastard, Lennart thought, mocking the little things, and do I have a complete set of plain clothes that even vaguely match? No. Bits and pieces and odds and ends, kriff I haven't worn that since I was a student...what the bloody hell is a feather boa doing there?  
In short, this is the wardrobe of a man who has worn uniform for almost all his adult life, and spent a lot of my adolescence before that playing silly buggers. Oh well. At least there isn't a traffic cone.

'What are we supposed to do if you get intercepted? Jumped, by the rebs or by the cops, or possibly both?'

'You want the job yourself, don't you?' Lennart said, not looking up from investigating the further reaches of his sock drawer.

'It is simply not the captain's job to go and do dangerous, stupid things like lead an away team,' Brenn said, indignantly.

'If you're trying to say that I'm too valuable to risk, then so are you, and you know it,' Lennart told him.

'Something this inherently dubious, anyone I could trust enough to get this done the way I need it to be done would be insufficiently expendable to send,' he said, specifically meaning Brenn. 'The buck stops with me anyway.'

'At least,' Brenn said, 'Take one of the ATR's. Better yet, use one of the Customs Corvettes and take a boarding platoon.'

'I'm supposed to have the power of the Force, you know,' Lennart pointed out, sounding not remotely sincere.

'And if it had any sense, it would be telling you to take backup too.'

'Such disrespect. Anyone would think you'd been paying attention,' Lennart said. 'Then again, you weren't just told that you were "potentially subject to the purge orders." Who should I bring to protect me from my backup?'

'You think Adannan would sink that low?' Brenn asked, thinking; bugger.

'Partly, by wandering off I'm daring him to. I'm offering him my back and challenging him to have the guts to stick the knife in.'

'Lousy bet, skipper. Any back alley thug would have to, for his own self-respect if nothing else.'

'I'm sure he would too, but I don't think he's going to react fast enough. He has enough pride in his own intelligence to resent the way I made his brain hurt, and try to win that point back. Should mean he's not going to resort to open violence in time. Which should mean that if I spin it properly, he's going to take that hit to his self respect, and be another move behind next time we have to lock horns,' Lennart said.

'Tell me, Captain, was it a sad or a happy day when you realised some people really do have levers?' Brenn said, with mock seriousness.

'Mostly sad, with overtones of maniacal laughter,' Lennart deadpanned.

'I think you're giving him more respect than he deserves. The ship and the squadron-'

'There are at least three other things I should be doing, you don't think I'd be going to drop them and do this instead if I didn't think it mattered?'

'Frankly, captain, I can think of at least three people you could be trying to avoid,' Brenn said, fairly boldly under the circumstances.

'Well done; that's where you come in,' Lennart said, pulling something that looked like an athletic supporter for a creature with four legs out and looking at it in puzzlement.

'The Chief, Kor Alric, Aleph-3?' Brenn guessed.

'Two out of three,' Lennart told him. 'Subtractor isn't worth repairing in the field; she goes back to Damorian and we borrow another one from the sector group. Repair estimates and assets required for Tarazed Meridian and Guillemot. Mirannon will go nuts; tell him not to break anybody.  
'Kor Alric, I want to avoid but can't afford to. We just parted on terms that, well, I reckon turning my back on him is a bigger risk than anything the rebels are likely to throw at me.  
'The third person I'm avoiding is Commander Falldess. She is not in a particularly calm mood right now. It was her evidence that kicked this off; that's what I'm going to go and wave at the Rebels. I expect her to press for immediate action . That's why Delvran's handling the debrief and analysis; he's good at recalling junior officers to their senses.'

'You're going off to stick it to them with evidence that your own units are still in the process of analysing?' Brenn wondered.

'I'm not legally certain enough to call base delta zero on the strength of it, but I am sufficiently convinced to employ it as a political weapon,' Lennart admitted. 'Tell Dordd to narrow-beam me with any conclusions on the way.'

'Double standard?' Brenn asked.

'In politics?' Lennart said with mock scepticism. 'She did bend her ship pretty inconveniently badly, so if she starts agitating, point Mirannon at her.' They both chuckled. 'In all seriousness, though, that is what you may have to do to Kor Alric.'

'He's not an officer; he's not a professional,' Brenn stated.

'If he understood his own limitations, that might be a valid point,' Lennart said, abandoning the sock drawer - to what, he didn't want to think about - and looking for something that would do as a civilian undershirt.  
'Do you actually want the job,' Lennart continued, 'of staring down a crazed dark acolyte of the Force, half mad with anger and only a hazy sense of the possible, ready to lash out in any direction?'

'Piett seems to manage it,' Brenn pointed out.

'Unless Adannan has very well hidden depths, he's nowhere near as good a tactician as Lord Vader-' Lennart started to say.

'How do you know he doesn't have hidden depths?' Brenn said. 'He might be pretending to be more of a loon than he actually is.'

'Point for me and against you if he does,' Lennart said, adding 'he can do patience, but only with effort - I think his wits sometimes trip over his temper. Looking over my shoulder, I'd expect him to have reacted fairly vigorously by now, if he had any more than an armchair admiral's training.  
'He's also nothing like as far up the ladder; he's a mid-ranking acolyte at best, possibly mid to low. He's under threat from inferiors, peers and superiors alike, and desperate enough to think that crazy stunts like this might help his career.'

'Senior Lieutenant equivalent, then,' Brenn opined. 'Look, Captain, we've dealt with inspectors and auditors before, we've faced problems and overcome them - with incident, but overcome. Adannan has the Force, and that may be a fairly worrying proposition, but he's not the demigod he's posing as.'

'No, just a man with no legal accountability and no sense of responsibility to make up the deficiency either. If he starts asking awkward questions, all right, baffle him with bullshit as usual - if he starts acting on them, get the Chief.' Lennart made it an order.

'Check. Any other instructions?'

'Yes. Don't initiate major offensive operations without me,' Lennart said. 'Sift out and interrogate any rRasfenoni among our existing prisoners, and, Dordd's the ranking officer of the squadron, you have the ship.  
'You can probe in the direction of the rRasfenoni, use the sweep line and recon-A, collect data, live prisoners if you can get them without knocking over anything too big and making too much of a fuss. If the dreck hits the fan, come and get me - if it really hits the fan, call 851 for support then come and get me.'

'Aye, aye, skipper - I still think this is more danger than it's worth, though,' Brenn said.

'Tell you when I get back.'

It was a fairly typical spaceport cantina; low ceiling, dimly lit, traveller-ridden. A distinctly higher share of the odd than the rest of the planet, drinks for dozens of different lifeforms behind the bar, and everybody glaring suspiciously at everyone else.

In one corner, where he could watch it all from, there was a smuggler.  
Dark haired, shirt that had maybe been white once, trousers with a prominent, flaring yellow bloodstripe, oversized blaster. There was a howl from the direction of the bar.

'Yeah, Chewie, get two.'

He noticed a man and a woman threading their way through the tables towards him; she would have caught anybody's eye, never mind that of a smooth rogue. Long tied-back flaring red hair, dark green gown - about twenty social levels too high for a mynock pit like this, but she could carry it off. She walked with a fluid grace that almost, not quite, hid her physical strength and the repeating pistol she carried low on one hip.  
She was a big girl, there was a lot of her and all of it was good. It took Han a couple of seconds for the gunfighter in him to get the better of the lecher and size her up as a potential opponent. She was pretty good there, too.

'Good afternoon, Captain Solo. I need to talk to you,' the man said. Han looked him over. Grey dewback-hide leather jacket, faded and patched, Coronet City Crushers sports-fan t-shirt, middle-aged, lean, almost black eyes. Didn't look that far out of place, but there was something about the way he held himself that made what he was wearing shout 'mufti.'

A spy or a soldier, Han thought. He didn't have to move his hand close to his blaster, in a place like this it was already there. Then again, he had dealt with a lot of shady people in a lot of shady places. And he needed the money.

'Yeah? So, talk,' he said. They sat down, she instantly pushed her chair back to watch as much of the cantina as possible. Chewie came back with two tall tumblers, foaming slightly blue, looked at them both and growled. He could sense something was wrong. Aleph-3 was tempted to growl back, but decided against it.

'You're not exactly a rebel yet, are you? More of a freelance contractor. Which means you have little of the protection being part of an armed movement gives you, you've still got all your old enemies as well as some pretty impressive new ones. Is having the fastest ship in the galaxy a matter of pride or necessity?' the man asked.

Solo looked closely at Lennart; wondering whether or not to shoot him. Lennart looked back.

Then the younger of the two Corellians grinned a wide, confident grin. 'It has come in useful a few times. I suppose now you're going to tell me you need something taken somewhere real fast.'

'And that translates as 'expensive', does it? Optimist. I suppose you want me to lay on a blockade for you to crash through as well,' Lennart said.

'Your drinks, Sir.' It was the waitress; she had come over to their table with a silvery duraplast tray, four glasses and a flask of Corellian brandy. Lennart nodded to her, almost a bow; she set them down, darted a venomous glance at the utterly unruffled Aleph-3, and flounced away.

'How come? I have to send a Wookie to the bar to rip people's arms off unless he gets served, and you get a tray?' Han said, indignant.

'Probably because she's met too many slick characters, she knows she can't trust you further than the length of your own shadow. Slainte.'

'You're a spacer.' Meaning, you're as bad as I am and I want to know how you got away with it. 'What happened to your ship?' Solo asked.

If I told you, you wouldn't believe me, Lennart thought. 'Yeah, I was Old Republic regular fleet, but…' he let that trail off. 'Thing is, what I need transported is small enough, just a datacard, but I have no idea where it's supposed to go.  
'Or rather, I don't know where the place it's supposed to go is. Alliance theater command.' He pulled a datacard out of a side pocket - too small to contain a gun - slowly, laid it on the table. 'Check it over. No viruses, no bugs, just evidence.'

'Evidence of what?' Solo said. Chewie picked up the card, trying the I'm-just-a-dumb-wookie act out for size; pretending to sniff it. He looked at Aleph-3 who was not at all convinced, gave it up and pulled a minicomp off his belt.

'It's not good news,' Lennart said. He was about to go into more detail when he noticed Aleph-3 was unusually tense, and looked round following her gaze.

Ah. Five men, four almost nondescript - a little too flash to blend in perfectly. One public face, wearing a tunic with black sleeves, white chest.

Han had noticed them too. 'Chewie, trouble.'

There were a squad of stormtroopers behind them; Aleph-3 was hand-signalling as demonstratively as she could without giving the game away. Bugger off, we're on a political gain operation, she gestured.

The response was one of total disbelief, combined with an imperative to identify.

Line 6NL, batch 27c, unit 392, she replied. Warrant Second, special operations.

The stormtroopers looked at each other briefly; she noticed one, the squad comtech, shrug and gesture that it checked out.

Ah…er. Oops. Would you like us to go away now? The squad leader signalled back. For all the apparent frivolity, they both knew that he was expendable in the interests of the mission.

Cover the rear, we might try to escape that way, she replied.

They acknowledged, and started backing out of the cantina, guns still levelled warily at all the lesser scum in there. The ISB thugs had noticed, but the agent hadn't. He kept closing in on his prey.

He had been chosen for this job, and told the plan was to apprehend a renegade fleet officer. So far, so good, and certainly an objective he could enjoy achieving.

It was the woman that caught his eye first of all. He could hardly keep his eyes off her; she looked back, proud, haughty, more like a duchess than a space bum, and the inevitable line came to mind, hey, baby, what's a girl like you doing in a dump like this?

Which was actually a good question. He looked at the people she was sitting with; thin man in grey leather flight jacket, vaguely familiar, perhaps he had been on a wanted notice? In fact, it had been on the news.

The other two - a man and a wookie - his eyes passed over them on the way back to the woman, and then his brain did a doubletake. Solo! Han kriffing Solo, Mr. I-shot-Vader, the second largest single bounty in the galaxy!

Aleph-3 looked at Lennart, meaning, how do we handle this?

Lennart glanced down at his hand on the grip of his own service pistol. That was clear enough, then.

The agent quick-drew his gun - respectable but way short of galactic-class - and announced 'Han Solo, Traitor, I arrest you in the -' which was as far as he got.

Han shot him, clean blast, dead centre; follow the movement across to snapshot into the chest of the centre-right gunsel, twitch back onto the left-centre, which would leave two of them, one for him and one for Chewie.

Still acting on reflex, he crouched to kick the table over for cover, then realised there was nobody left to shoot at.

'-afterlife?' Lennart finished the agent's sentence for him. 'And really, Solo, really. You'd do that to fine Corellian brandy?'

He was largely putting on his calm, Han noticed. In fact, Lennart was reciting to himself a fragment of something he had read as a student; it seems to me - he was remembering how it went - that men are of different value; and there are some who can be knocked on the head without the world being very much poorer for it. The ISB probably counted as such.

'Would you like to wait here and see if the Marines agree with you?' Aleph-3 said. Han was almost sure she had nailed the two on the left, she had started with the one who had been his third target, the agent had already been falling when he nailed him.

'Good point,' Han said, drained his glass. 'With me.' He started heading for the staff door by the bar

'They'll be waiting there. Out the front,' Aleph-3 said, moving the other way. Lennart followed her, Han and Chewie shared a look then decided, what the hell.

There was a vehicle there, an unmanned Ubrikkian ground-skimmer personnel transport. No stormtroopers. 'What do you think, add grand theft speeder to the charge sheet?' Lennart suggested.

'No,' Aleph-3 said. 'It'll have a tracking beacon, and even if we could start to run for it-'

'We'd still have to talk our way past whatever they have in place as operational security,' Lennart finished, looking at Han.

'I've bluffed my way out of trouble a thousand times, and all people remember is one little screwup,' Han said, rolling his eyes - before getting back to business. 'Does anyone else think this is weird? No cordon, no support.'

'Done on the quiet; they didn't want anyone else to share the glory,' Lennart suggested.

'Let's just stroll away, casual like,' Han decided.

'Not too far. I want to see how they react to this,' Lennart decided, and looked around. Like most provincial starports, it was less than perfectly planned; disused landing pads being used for warehouses, port workers' housing, markets and cantinas, disused warehouses being converted into landing pads, a constant process of decay and renovation.

Not particularly fast, a generational thing, but there was enough cover nearby to duck into. Han passed by two cantinas and settled on a third, a convenient sprint away from where he had left the Falcon.

They took a window table, this time, where Solo could look down at the street.

'Well, that was uneventful. I had no idea the life of a hardened galactic criminal could be so relaxing,' Lennart said, kidding.

'You're legit?' Han said, surprised and trying to place the man's face. Where had he come across him? A face in the crowd at Smuggler's Rest, or one of a hundred other shadowports?

'Quasi-legitimate,' Aleph-3 couldn't resist saying.

'Compared to you and the people you have after you, everybody starts to acquire a thin gloss of respectability,' Lennart was wondering how far to ride the bluff when Han's forehead wrinkled in an obvious a-hah moment.

'Stang, I do recognise you,' Han realised. 'The only man ever to turn down a first class-' and then he remembered exactly what the circumstances had been.

'Not the only one, not even the only man in the last century. Never trust a journalist's memories. I refused the award of a first class bloodstripe, normally posthumous, because for a twenty-five man strike team, it was a suicide job.  
'I called for volunteers, told them they were going to die, they still agreed to go and I still sent them anyway.  
'The difference between being a good officer and a hero, a good officer rigs the game to give his own side maximum possible advantage, uses every lever to manipulate the odds. The hero is the one who beats the odds, the guy the thin possibility comes up for, and that was what the bloodstripe was supposed to be about. Being a hero - or at least a successful chancer.'

Chewie howled, asking Han what was going on.

'Our friend here turns out to be true-blue Imperial,' Han said, bitterly, but not going for his gun, not just yet. Looking around, anyway, he had the unpleasant feeling of being watched.

'So were you, once,' Lennart reminded him.

'The whiteshirt, just a sacrifice for the cause?' Han was angry - why, he wasn't even sure. Lennart's betrayal? Come to think of it, he had been carefully noncommittal - nothing unusual in a place like that.

'I have no more moral problem shooting at the ISB than I do blowing my nose,' Lennart said. 'Every revolution brings out its share of thugs and bullies and little poisoned souls. Some stay freelance, and some work their way into the new establishment. The ISB are the roaches in the ductwork of the Empire, and any excuse I can get to blow them up in the line of duty is a good excuse.'

What was he up to? Han thought. An Imperial Starfleet captain, in plain clothes, bumps into me - high on the Most Wanted list - in a bar, and helps me shoot some whiteshirts. How is that supposed to make sense?

'So you don't like the police, is that supposed to make you a good guy?' He asked.

'It worked for Airen Cracken,' Lennart pointed out, before going on. 'The whole good-guy bad-guy thing, criminal versus law enforcement, terrorist or freedom fighter - that's just a way to spoil a day out.  
'I have a mission requirement that supersedes taking you in, all you'll get out of trying to shoot me is a head full of blaster bolts from my covering party; when all else fails, why not attempt civilisation?'

'You're strange,' Han said.

'You're the one who boasts about having flown from one side of the galaxy to the other and seen a lot of strange stuff. Why let this get you down?'

'So, you find me, how? And, what, you want me to arrange your defection to the Alliance? I warn you, the pay's dreck,' Han said, coolly.

'About as likely as me offering you a commission again…I've enjoyed the last few years. It's been a relief to have a declared enemy to go up against, and frankly I have enough rebel blood on my hands that I wouldn't expect them to take me. In fact, I'd be disappointed with their lack of standards if they did,' Lennart said.

'A senior Imperial officer with principles? There's something you don't see every day,' Han said.

Lennart refused to get annoyed. 'That's why you'll lose in the end. Lot of ups and downs still to happen, and you may win some tactical victories along the way, but as long as the Alliance continues to believe itself to be the sole possessor of justice and right, you're doomed to continually misread friends and enemies both.'  
A stray notion occurred to Lennart; he grinned and said 'Are you sure you don't want your old job back?'

Aleph-3 and Chewbacca both looked at him as if he had finally flipped, then Aleph-3 realised it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for Lennart to actually mean it.

Han was watching them both, and was fascinated by her reaction. 'She thinks you might be serious.' That did tug at his gut a bit. The Imperial Starfleet had been a gigantic broken promise, to him; something that had turned to dreck the moment he touched it.  
Now this maniac came to him with…what? Some kind of promise to make good after all?

'The really weird thing is, I think I actually would be able to swing it,' Lennart said, thinking about the repercussions and enjoying it.

'I could give you a squadron in the space transport wing, two Gamma assault shuttles, two Beta-3 escort transports, and the Falcon of course, at the substantive rank of Lieutenant-Commander.'

'And the bounties on my head, or had you forgotten?' Han asked. His gut reaction had settled down to 'this is insane' but he wanted to see how far Lennart was prepared to go with it.

'Not a problem. Legally we could lease the Falcon from you, there's some money towards paying it off, pay and prize money of course, shouldn't take more than two or three years.'

Chewbacca made a noise somewhere between 'when did they let you out of the asylum, mate?' and 'why are we listening to this man?'

Lennart looked at Aleph-3, nodded towards Chewbacca and asked her 'What do you think, Flight Sargeant, or would I actually have to make him a Midshipman?'

Aleph-3 said, 'Kor Alric would want you dead after that.'

'Probably,' Lennart acknowledged, 'but if I tell him about this in the right way I might push his blood pressure up so high he actually strokes out. Another fringe benefit.'

'Half the Personnel Bureau would want you dead,' she pointed out.

'Yes, but the other half would be so cock-a-hoop over the propaganda coup that I should be able to get them arguing with each other then slip out the middle. That would probably be the hardest part of the entire operation,' he said to Han, 'keeping the journalists and propagandists off your back.'

'You know, I'm half tempted to go along with this crazy stunt, just to see if you can actually pull it off,' Han said; Chewbacca glared at him. 'Who's Kor Alric?'

'Special Agent and resident albatross,' Lennart said, consciously deciding not to bring the Force into this, 'I'm starting to refer to him as the political operations officer. Which is excessively mild, but calling him the Kor Responsible for Intelligence and Fleet Functions would just be too obvious.'

Aleph-3 had to make a conscious effort to slip out of character and back into a neutral mode of mind, to avoid rolling on the floor laughing, it was so utterly ridiculous. That would spread through the legion and the crew - the entire squadron - like wildfire. Once she told them.

'You talk about being a successful chancer, ever think your still being in the Starfleet is stang thin odds?' Han asked him.

'Sometimes, but they don't hand out medals for being a deviant looney. Just as well; if they did, can you imagine the awards committee?'

'I can imagine quite a lot…but not that, no,' Han said.

'Probably be the Ubiqtorate anyway, whichever intercept gave them the biggest unintentional comedy moment. In all seriousness,' he said, changing tone to something far more serious, 'my survival under Imperial colours is down to two factors; first of all the amount of rebel blood on my hands, and second, something you never were able to get the hang of, playing the system.'

'Yeah, I joined up with this naïve assumption that the powers of officialdom would be honest about what they expected from me…' Han's voice trailed off.

'I know you intended to be sarcastic there, but that really does sound pretty spectacularly naïve when you put it like that,' Lennart pointed out.

'I was at Raithal when some of your instructors were at Carida; they said you were too straight for your own good. Deliberately trying to break with your past and play it that way?'

'So, what would you have done? If you'd been me,' Han asked.

'Made sure I went after Vader and kept shooting until there was nothing left but a cloud of hot gas, but that's not what you mean, is it? Your court martial,' Lennart said.

'And what made it happen,' Han said. Chewbacca growled.

'I was done for usurping the lawful chain of command, back in '17. You're not the only one who's been there,' Lennart said; Aleph-3 visibly perked up her ears.

'Speaking of which, you got given that detail because of your background. Whoever in personnel put you on to it assumed you were a street-hardened survivor, a morality-free zone who wouldn't give a stang about anyone or anything else's suffering. Weren't you running drugs for Jabba?'

'Yes, I've been around, but what,' Han said, 'has that got to do with it?'

'It makes it look uncomfortably like the personnel office had a point. Anyway, defending yourself at a court martial's an inherently weak position. Counterattack is much more effective. I would have looked to see what charges I could have made against the arresting officer - start with wasting Imperial time; how long does it actually take to shave a wookie?'

Chewbacca growled menacingly, meaning there was absolutely no way they were going to find out.

'That would have never have worked; they had the whole business sewn up tighter than-' Han said.

'And there is where you could really have nailed them to the wall. You're instinctively talking about them as if they were a criminal gang. And you reacted as if you were a low ranking hood rather than an officer of the Empire.'

'By that point, I felt as if I was a low ranking hood,' Han replied.

'The Empire's a new thing, its traditions aren't set in stone, and even if it does break its own rules, it couldn't afford to get caught doing so, not then, not over that. Never understood politics, did you?'

'A lot of boring talk by a lot of boring people-' Han said.

'How you ever summoned up the attention span to learn to fly I don't know. Listen; the Empire is touchy on the subject of slavery, and facing in about three different directions, because the formal abolition of most of it was one of the big bones thrown to the ex-Separatists.  
'The return of so many of them from one state of servitude or other helped patch up a lot of the demographic damage. The species who got hit by the new regs,' he said nodding to Chewbacca, 'were those that had sided particularly closely with the old Republic, especially with the Jedi order. Which is fractionally less important than getting caught gaming the system for personal glory and profit. In the circumstances - wasting Imperial time, using Imperial resources for personal gain, the peculation and corruption - then if you ever did, you could and should have played it by the book.  
'Tell me this; did what you did, stunning your commander and letting a shipload of escaped slaves go, make any difference to the overall situation? Any at all?'

'No,' Solo admitted. 'I had to do it, though. You weren't there, I couldn't sit back and let a shipful of wookies down.'

'Just because you have to do something is no excuse for not being clever about it. Admit it; if you'd known then what you know now, you'd do things differently,' Lennart said.

'Yeah, I wouldn't have stunned him, I'd have shot the lot of them, given their guns to the wookies and led an armed revolt.'

Captain Lennart shook his head, and said, 'You have to think past the merely tactical.'

There was a long pause as the two men looked at each other. 'I helped blow up a death star. How much more do you want?'

'That was just adding insult to injury; the military loss was embarrassing, but it was secondary to the political damage caused, by the Empire's own hand, by choosing to rely on the damn thing. That thing might as well have had a giant "kick me" sign painted on it anyway, it made so many people nervous the Starfleet would have had a go at it sooner or later, if the Alliance didn't. Far too many moving parts, too,' Lennart said.

'So what the rebellion was just, unnecessary? Bit late for everyone on Yavin if we'd left it to you,' Han said.

'Don't blame me for your unnecessary risks; should have been more cellular and better divided than that anyway - and I do need you to take a message to Rebel regional command.'

'I don't get it,' Han said. 'Why do you want to be part of something as pompous, stuffy, tight-arsed, hidebound-?'

'The Starfleet has to let a few Corellians in, just so there's somebody competent around when they need a job done. Like anything galaxy-sized, there are jobs we need good men for and jobs we need disownable scum for. My point is that by expecting it to be completely full of criminals and extortionists, we do the Empire no favours - help it to become exactly that, in fact. We have to hold it to some kind of standard.'

'I've still got dents in the Falcon's plating where the bits of Alderaan bounced off - what kind of standard is that?' Han said.

'A pretty high standard of applied firepower,' Lennart said, 'but that's not what - actually, when you look at it sideways, that pretty much exactly is what I mean. Leaving aside the utterly low-probability events that admittedly actually happened, what was the logical way, the practical way to attack the Death Star? From the inside.'

'When I was in there, they weren't that tough,' Han said.

The troopers probably mistook you for a Jedi, thought no-one else could be that crazy,' Aleph-3 said; Chewbacca howled in agreement. 'They fell back to a rally point, then counterattacked.'

'So what is it you want to talk to Alliance regional command about?' Han said, changing back on subject.

'You know, I could go and do it myself, just give me their address…' Lennart said, kidding. 'Your local allies. The little guys with the too many arms. They have some remarkably bad habits - like dropping rocks on their neighbours. Near-C velocity rocks, which is not a neighbourly thing, and does not exactly qualify them to be on the side of truth, justice and right.  
'Now we could sweep in, jump all over their heads, and call them a prime example of the real iniquity of the rebellion, or you could clean your own house. Hmm?'

Solo took a couple of moments to take it in. He was more boggle-resistant than Adannan. It was Chewie who howled meaning, 'I told you there was something weird going on.'

Han's first thought was that he had been through enough double and triple crosses to recognise one when it tried to bite him.

'You really can't afford to walk away from this,' Lennart said. 'The evidence is all here.' He pointed at the datacard.

'If you can prove it,' Han said, 'why don't you splash it all over the media?'

'Might yet happen,' Lennart admitted. 'This is a Hobson's choice. The only alternatives are to have the tale of your allies' deeply dubious past and actively homicidal present spread, indeed, all over the media, and then have them blasted to bits in a righteous and noble act by the Empire, or to move fast, sort them out and do the fighting, and take the losses, yourselves.  
'Kriff it, Han, this is the Empire offering you the option; how much of a genuine positive do you expect?' Lennart said, tacitly admitting quite a lot.

'How serious were you about offering me a job?' Han asked.

'I didn't expect you to take it, but there were at least three good reasons for making the offer. First of all, the effect on my own political officer - I know there would be problems,' Lennart said to Aleph-3, 'but let me enjoy dwelling on the up side, for now.  
'Second, the effect on your political superiors. Anything that ruins Mon Mothma's day is all right with me. Smug, sanctimonious cow. She was always one of our favourite targets,' Lennart said, remembering his student days, 'but her security was too good; what a shame the memory-metal whoopee cushion plan never came off…'

Chewbacca made a sound that Lennart guessed translated as, 'I really don't want to know.'

'The third reason,' Lennart said, ignoring Aleph-3's horrified fascination and Han trying not to agree with her, 'is that you are an asset to the Rebellion. Theoretical idealism is all very well, but the Alliance desperately needs filters.  
'You know not all the stories of Rebel atrocities are just propaganda; there are more than a few criminals, extortionists, terrorists, and just plain thugs trying to make what they do sound better by hiding behind the banner of the Republic. Your local allies being a spectacularly huge example. Any illegal movement is going to attract some people who are just plain illegal, who would be on the wrong side of any law. The Alliance needs people who can operate in the underbelly, tell the difference between the idealists, the cynics and the bit-of-both.'

'What about the Imperial atrocities?' Han counterpointed.

'Comes back to the same issue - quality of personnel. The higher a standard we can establish and maintain, the fewer blots on the Empire's honour there'll be; you tried to do the right thing, in the wrong way. I hope you'll try to do the right thing now.'

'Once we work out what it is,' Han said.

'Good luck finding that loophole,' Lennart said.

'I don't think I'll take that job offer after all,' Han decided. 'It would involve shooting at too many people I've got kinda fond of.'

'I thought you'd say that,' Lennart admitted. 'It was worth a chance. Oh, and don't get yourself arrested now, it would be deeply embarrassing to have to come and break you out - that's not an invitation. QX, lads, you can come out now.'

The 'covering party' revealed itself; four people at the next table, six came out from the kitchens, three from a table further away, four in off the balcony, five in the front door. All in civilian dress.

'Was that all right, skipper?' one of them asked.

'Han, I'd like you to meet Charge Chief Vilberksohn and his merry pirates - volunteers from among my crew. Bit more discreet than a stormtrooper platoon,' Lennart introduced them.

Right, outnumbered twelve to one. 'You're sure you don't want me dead? I mean, don't go changing your mind now.'

'Remember that run through the iceteroids, with the frigate on your tail?' Lennart asked; Han nodded. 'If I'd really wanted you dead, I'd have jumped Black Prince in and simply kept firing from the main guns. Your Falcon's a tough ship, but not that tough.'

He noticed the smuggler's hand getting closer to his gun. 'That's not an invitation, either. See you around.'

Lennart, Aleph-3 and the covering party filed out, most of them walking backwards to keep Solo covered.

Aleph-3 said the same thing to Lennart that Chewbacca was saying to Han; 'That was strange.'

'Pleasant relief,' Lennart said. 'After fencing for my life with Adannan, it was wonderfully relaxing to do that for fun and profit. Almost a day out.'

'Aren't you worried about being quoted?' she asked.

'You can quote me all you like about the whoopee cushion,' Lennart replied. 'Come on, back to the shuttle, then back to the squadron; let's see what's gone hideously wrong in our absence.


	31. Chapter 31

Orbital space over Ghorn II was getting distinctly crowded, so much so that the squadron, and its cripples, had moved out to L4. Mirannon had grumbled about losing time on that, but kept working anyway.

Tarazed Meridian had followed Black Prince's fashion by painting up the silhouette of the rRasfenoni frigate - over the sector group's objections. Whether they were wise to do so was doubtful. Whether they were going to keep their ship wasn't entirely certain, for that matter.

Most of the ships of the squadron had donated, whether they meant to or not, a large share of their engineering personnel.

Mirannon had just about invented the perpetual motion machine, himself. He was so busy organising, evaluating and testing and deciding what needed to be done, he was shorting the unimportant stuff like sleep and food. Not that he actually had to; there were at least two other officers of equal rank, and supposed expertise - the chief engineers of Dynamic and Perseverance.

Then there was the committee that ran Voracious's engine spaces, the frigates' chief engineers, and the dozens of men - and three women and two of uncertain or variable gender - who held the post on the smaller ships of the squadron.

He had more than enough deputies, theoretically able and at least approximately willing or at least determined not to get caught out lagging behind, so the point of doing it all himself was?

Either I am not a control freak, he was telling himself as he watched the sensor data come in of the cracks in Tarazed Meridian's hull frame, or I am the worst kind - one in denial.

I have competent deputies and juniors, men I trained myself; I know how much I can safely leave them to be getting on with. I've had enough time to make fair assessments of the rest of the squadron's engineer teams. Professional pride gone wrong? No man better than his logic, no-one more sound than the work he does - coupled to a warped imperative to maintain his position and his rank by being the rightest, by getting to decisions before anyone else, even the men whose competence he trusted to make them on their own? Doing more than anyone else, to justify my rank and place?

Could be something in that, but it's a fool's act to try to do more than everybody else, Mirannon told himself, with no real expectation that he was listening.

I wonder if this Force crap could actually be good for something, he thought. Does the whole increased endurance aspect, biophysical potential, work when you're actually doing something useful, or does it have to be either 'om' or 'rargh'?

No time to spare to om - to experiment with the supposed light, no staff to spare to do things - well, murder probably - with the dark. If the Force is a disease, then we should treat it. If it's an asset, then we, the Skipper and myself, need a cost-benefit analysis, to decide how to best exploit it. A valid analysis is going to take more data - hmmm. What have we here?

His subconscious mind had been watching the survey data come in. Tarazed Meridian's team had been sounding the hull, releasing a time-coded pattern of vibrations and monitoring how they reverberated. It was a second-string procedure, and he was mainly doing it to check the integrity of the internal monitoring system.

Other quirk, he thought, we wouldn't be going to all this trouble if it was bad news. That, we'd accept. Irrationally. If the network was telling me that the hull had delaminated and had more flaws in it than a politician's logic, then we'd grumble, try to avoid the responsibility for writing her off, until somebody snapped and agreed to do the paperwork.

As it is, the damage looks to be confined to the actual containment shell. Worth analysing, that - or recording for subsequent analysis, under the circumstances. Which is good, because the reactor containment vessel can be removed in one piece. One badly cracked and gouged piece, but there are procedures for it. Straightforward dockyard job, and with the priorities Adannan can obtain we can get that down from the usual three months to five or six days.

There's another job someone is going to have to do: oversight. Keeping the locals honest, in more senses of the term than one. A panic job like that is likely to have its troubles anyway, even without the possibility of flanging it, contractor fraud and outright sabotage.

'Prokhor, what do you make of this?' he asked Tarazed Meridian's chief engineer.

Engineer Lieutenant-Commander Prokhor Subradal was an interesting contrast: he was a muun. So thin that if he stood side on he almost disappeared, skin dotted with acid burns. Mirannon hadn't quite got around to asking him what he was doing in a Starfleet uniform, in a violent occupation far from home. Time to find out.

'Not unpredictable,' he said, slightly condescending. 'Given Tarazed Meridian's resuming the action, and managing to maintain combative efficiency in other respects, why should it surprise you that the rest of the hull should show no major fault?'

'That much is obvious,' Mirannon said coldly. He disliked the muun's supercilious tone - what did that mean, anyway? Something to do with cilia, feelers? Or just plain silly?

'What I mean is, how did it manage to remain relatively intact? Some shock damage, mostly fixable, but the main frame withstood the concussion, didn't dislocate. The main reactor chamber didn't rupture. Autosystem with a programmed shutdown reflex in some piece of legacy software? Momentary loss of containment, long enough to fuse some of the emergent fractures? Fantastic luck if it was. 'More likely the impact area momentarily flexed inward through the containment fields, they seared the shell and took most of the impact and it was that temporary contamination problem that autoSCRAMed the reactor.

'Of course, I'm plucking hypotheses out of the aether here, but I think we can gather the evidence to properly put them to the proof. Ah, this should be good.'

'With all due respect-' the muun engineer began.

'Are you some kind of warped, mutant politician? All right, that's a tautology, but you mean "you're nuts", don't you? Might as well say what you really mean.'

'How will this task give a return for the effort you intend to expend on it?' Prokhor decided to say.

'It probably won't, but that's not the point. This is going to be a hobby project, I need something to keep my brain ticking over while I'm not officially busy,' Mirannon mocked himself.

'You're nuts,' the muun engineer said.

That was better. Mirannon chuckled, and said, 'Just how many normal people do you see prepared to accept responsibility for a fourteen trillion terawatt reactor set, and everything attached to it?'

The muun's forehead wrinkled, which considering how much there was of it was moderately impressive. 'Did your tongue just slip there?' he asked.

'No,' Mirannon grinned. Reinforced shell, thermal collectors and additional secondaries. 'That's the payoff for projects like this, superior exploitation through superior knowledge.'

'Perhaps there is some point to abstraction after all,' Prokhor agreed.

'How did you get into this business, anyway?' Mirannon asked. 'I know muuninlist is relatively strongly casted, and engineers are one of the higher castes, which normally I'd consider that social setup a massive waste of potential but the details mean you must be doing something right.'

'It is an opportunity cost,' the muun started to defend his way of life, 'that society as a whole chooses to pay, and receives in these times a critical measure of stability and a useful focus of effort - ah. Humour.'

'You can drop the we-are-rational-beings-who-know-only-logic act; to get this far in the Starfleet you have to be able to take a joke.'

'My race is also famous as bankers, accountants and efficiency experts,' Prokhor reminded him.

'Point taken,' Mirannon acknowledged - although that was a well concealed taking of the piss in there anyway. 'Question still stands.'

'In the chaos of the first war, the probability of personal survival seemed significantly greater behind the guns than in front,' the muun stated. That was how a lot of people, including Mirannon, had found themselves in the Starfleet. 'I stayed because of…inertia, and certain private reasons.'

'The reason I ask is that I have a particular job in mind. What do you think happens next to Tarazed Meridian?' Mirannon asked him, wondering if the private reasons included any form of embezzlement and corruption.

'Obviously something other than the expected, or you wouldn't bother to say so. A ship that has lost its main power plant could easily be condemned to be broken up. Is the departure from the norm you have in mind that it is not to be so? To remove and replace the reactor module would be a 160-day,' he licked a finger and held it in the air as if he was testing the breeze, 'possibly 170-day job.'

That was a lot longer than Mirannon's estimate, although presumably he knew the local repair yards well enough to have a reason for that claim.

'That's what I intend. If we call it in as an emergency priority override, I want it done in six days, not a hundred and sixty.'

The muun boggled slightly. Six days? To move how much matter? The seven hundred metre frigate weighed a hundred and sixty million tons, the reactor globe alone nineteen million. Not that big a deal. Cutting it loose, fusing a replacement in place, testing it, attaching the power couplings, feeding shields, tensors, stasis and relative-inertial fields through it - the size of the job was trivial, it was the complexity. To do it in anything like that time wasn't a heavy lifting problem; it was a test of competence under pressure. That was what the sector repair yards might have a problem with.

'What would you say,' Mirannon tried not to make it sound like he was probing, which he was, 'if I mentioned that it would be a superb opportunity to exploit the system?' He was watching the muun's reaction carefully.

'High levels of wastage are all too likely, oversight is rushed off their feet; a lot of kit and a lot of credits could go walking in a situation like that.'

As he had suspected, the muun was too rational to commit himself out of hand. 'I would say that the situation required careful analysis, based on the precise conditions obtaining at the time.'

'You probably know the numbers yourself anyway, but the usual reckoning is that the Republic fleet paid an average of a hundred and forty-seven percent of ideal market value for its ships. Some of the overrun was legitimate waste, but not much. Remarkably few people want to commit themselves as to how well the Empire's doing by comparison, but I reckon the situation's worse. Enforcement are less likely to be on the take themselves, true, but much less likely to spot someone who is. And there are so many more and bigger opportunities…'

Stang, Mirannon thought. If I overdo the pitch I might actually talk him into it.

'Commander, as part of an old style formation, the bounty and prize regulations still apply to you, do they not?' Prokhor probed in his turn.

'As a matter of fact, they do.' The basic rate of pay was higher than it had been in the Republic, but bounties for destroyed enemy ships and the proceeds of captures being sold off were no longer paid. The Imperial Starfleet officially no longer needed the mercenary impulse; its spacemen and marines fought for the glory of the New Order, and that and three credits would buy you an ale.

Legally speaking, bounties were still paid for the destruction or capture of enemy or renegade vessels, but they went into the coffers of the organisation, not the individuals involved.

One of the more interesting organisational cockups that had befallen - in the sense of 'carefully arranged' - Black Prince was that, because of her theoretically interim position- however firmly she actually belonged to DesRon 851 - the old rules still applied. Considering the extent of her score sheet, most of the veterans who had been with the ship for a while were fairly well off.

'Does that also apply to the ships attached?' Prokhor asked carefully.

Mirannon sensed an end-run. 'For the duration of your assignment to 851-Yod, yes.'

'That should be a substantial influx of raw credits, then. For the time being I will have enough to do working that into my existing portfolio…perhaps next yea,.' Prokhor declined, fairly straight faced; hard to tell what he was thinking.

For a short moment, Mirannon actually wanted to have the Force, if only to detect the depth of lie. Then again, that would deprive his brain of the exercise it took to actually work it out. Prokhor was not honest, at least not sufficiently honest to turn it down out of hand. On the other hand, was he greedy enough to omit to consider his own personal future on a ship that had been jury-rigged back together by a gang of scheming packrats, who regarded theft as one of the perks of the job?

'On the other side of the credchip, have you considered what, exactly, is being wasted here?'

'If the Imperial Starfleet has so much taxpayer's credit coming in that it can afford to be exploited thus, and continue to grow at its present rate, then the place for a cunning exploiter is clearly in the administrative branches,' the muun replied.

'Point taken.' Mirannon admitted. 'No necessary link between greed and intelligence, though - and this is the problem; the reason for the crash priority is because Captain Lennart wants your ship back in the line before we have to deploy properly. How would you feel about having to look after a ship that's been rebuilt under those conditions?'

'Ah. The demand side of the equation,' Prokhor quipped, thinking about it. 'What would you have done if I had leaped enthusiastically at the possibility of making a few credits off the fat hog of the Starfleet?'

'If you go around leaping enthusiastically at fat hogs, I'd have signed you up to a Hutt dating service,' Mirannon said, before going on to mention the stick. 'Seriously? Had you audited.'

'The Hutts may be a lesser sacrifice, although with their affinity for money, and the necessary investment in personal security to keep them away, there might be little difference in the long run. That would be a genuinely vile thing to do, an audit.' The Muun shivered thinking about it.

'Viler than sending out a half-finished, half-reliable ship? You,' Mirannon prodded a finger at him, 'are the key being, in the key position, to make sure it goes to plan - or not.'

'I have to manage and maintain whatever the yard leaves us with, so I do have a direct personal interest,' the muun said, thinking unpleasant thoughts about being responsible for a half-botched hypermatter reactor. 'Six days?'

'This ship has to be ready in another nine. Take no more time than that, the real timescale is, as ever, ASAP. Your estimate was double my own; if the local yards are that sloppy, you'll have your work cut out stopping them trying to rob you blind.

'Which is secondary,' Mirannon reminded him, 'to making sure they do good work.'

'Power, structure, ion engines, hyperdrive, computing, and now project manager and thief-taker on top. Does my basic rate of pay go up to compensate for the extra challenges involved?' Prokhor asked.

'Why do you think so many people resort to fraud?' Mirannon asked, rhetorically, then went on, 'Ah, it's not so bad. What other job is going to give you so varied a range of experience and such a depth of responsibility?'

'Being the janitor in a Coruscanti skyscraper probably comes close, but with half the stress and none of the danger,' Prokhor said, gloomily. 'We'll get it done.'

On board the Dynamic, Falldess was not especially impressed. She had arrived in mid-exercise, apparently; the destroyer was under simulated attack, and suffering from local shield failures, ionisations, compartment breaches - all too familiar a sight.

At first she had assumed that it was hazing, out of rivalry and jealousy, and determined to take it professionally, be cool about it. Then she started paying more attention to the reactions of the crew, and noticed how close to panic some of them were.

Whoever was running it was doing a fairly good job of simulating battle damage; the sound effects over the ship's PA, the lighting and the vent system, worst of all the compensators, all contributed. The crew's reactions were barely contained panic; too much screaming, too much running around, few traces of concerted, disciplined action.

As she listened to the thudding of the impacts through the deck frame - simulated - she realised what they were being hit with wasn't actually that bad. Medium gun fire, no more.

She turned to the junior lieutenant who had met her shuttle. 'What were the terms of reference for this?'

'A planetary ion cannon hit paralysed the ship, she drifted out of range, we're being pursued by system defence boats trying to finish us off before we can bring things back on line.'

'Who's winning?' she asked.

'System defence boats, I think.'

It certainly seemed that way; she looked at the chaos around her and itched to start doing something about it, take charge and tell them what do to - but it was a side of the job she didn't understand very well herself, and it was another man's ship.

The path aft to the bridge tower was long and convoluted, and she got to see quite a lot of what was going wrong.

One problem, she simply couldn't stop herself getting involved with. She heard the shouting first, went to see. Two men and a droid, blue armbands, shouting at a regulatory branch PO.

'Get out of the way, you kriffing idiot-' Most people thought that you had to be a computer to understand the Imperial Starfleet's system of rates, but rank was clear enough. For an Able Spaceman, no more, to swear at a regulator PO was unlikely verging on death wish.

'What did you call me, boy? Now shut up and lie down like a good little casualty before I rip you-'

'We're exempt, don't you know what blue means or are you submoronic as well as colour blind?'

On a damage control exercise, with confusing conditions, hostile environments and high powered tools being wielded by frightened men, there was a predictably increased risk of real accident - genuine casualties in addition to the simulated ones. Command had prepared properly by arranging a 'blue team' of medics and other personnel exempt from the conditions of the exercise, who would deal with the genuinely hurt and damaged - but the regulatory branch seemed not to have got the memo.

She got there just as the regulator swung for the medic; he went down, and the other medic and the droid jumped him.

Falldess found it hard to believe; had it been staged for her benefit? A reaction test? If so, they were very good actors, genuine-seeming hate for each other, genuine shock and horror as they found an unfamiliar and fairly senior officer glaring at them.

'You, able spacer-'

'Korschjleim, casualty retrieval technician, ma'am.' The bloody nose medic said, standing up.

'You may be right, but you're a fool. To swear at and swing for a superior rate, even one in the wrong - you will be reported for this. Now get about your business, and fast.'

The medical team saluted and scuttled clear, leaving the petty officer. 'Your name,' she asked him, coldly.

'Bosun's Mate Second Sterdel, Commander.' She could almost hear him thinking "I don't know her, not from my ship, don't have to answer to her" - and realising what she would do to him if he did.

'Blue was the clearance colour of this exercise, was it not?'

'Clearance colour?' the BM2 looked bewildered.

No time for this nonsense, she thought. She pointed her finger at him, said 'Zap. A rebel boarding party shot you, you are a casualty. While you're playing dead and waiting for your divisional officer to come and roast you, you may want to look up the terms of the exercise and work out what it was you got wrong.'

'Commander? You can't actually-'

'Lieutenant,' Falldess asked her escort, 'Can I borrow your sidearm?'

When she finally got to the bridge tower, she was shown into a ready room with two men already there. One officer, probably from this ship, one enlisted - interestingly wearing a uniform jacket with gunnery patches and Black Prince's emblem.

'Good afternoon, Commander.' The officer - a navigation Lieutenant - said. 'The captain's been detained, he will be a little while.'

Falldess noticed the ranker was looking at the ceiling, playing 'I'm not here, don't take any notice' so ostentatiously she couldn't help noticing. Petty - no, recently promoted chief petty officer.

'Explain.' She asked him, specifically.

'Unavoidable ship's business,' the lieutenant said. Oily tone.

Krivin Hruthhal ignored him. 'Captain Dordd didn't intend to take part in the exercise itself, just observe, but the crew managed to turn it into a grade alpha cluster - excuse me, ma'am, a major mess. He had to take charge personally, just to ensure that they would do something, and maybe learn something. Maybe.'

'I have had enough of your disrespect. You will-' the lieutenant snapped back.

'The Commander asked me a direct question, Lieutenant. Sir,' Hruthhal said, with no respect whatsoever.

'Why are you here?' Falldess asked the petty officer.

'The turret team was detached from Black Prince to perform instructional duty on this ship; right now, I'm here because we were handling the simulated attack, and the Lieutenant and the Senior Chief couldn't be spared.'

'Chief Petty Officer, you will keep silent!' the lieutenant shouted at him.

On one hand, Falldess thought, the solidarity of the officer corps. On the other, she wanted to find out what the petty officer had to say, and quiz him about this ship and his own.

'Why would that be, Lieutenant? I certainly don't feel disrespected.'

The comment 'don't worry, I'm sure we can arrange something' passed across Hruthhal's mind, but he knew better than to say it. Besides which, this was definitely not a good time.

'This man and the rest of his team have been consistently and aggressively disobedient, cited standing orders and special privilege more times than I can count-'

Falldess suppressed a laugh at Hruthhal's expression; it was true, the subassembly team chief was thinking, he really can't count that high. Careful to keep that expression away from the lieutenant, though.

'Have formal charges been presented?' Falldess asked.

'Yes. Yes, they have,' the lieutenant said, with repressed anger. This wasn't fair. He was here to extend his captain's apologies, how had he got stuck between this near-rebel enlistee and a woman officer with a chip on her shoulder? He presumed she did. Most of them did.

'And?' Falldess asked.

'Our divisional officer dismissed the charges,' Hruthhal pointed out, looking embarrassed, 'with the comment, endorsed by the gunnery officer, that a ship whose record was one of consistent failure to perform hardly deserved respect.'

'You're not supposed to know that,' the Lieutenant screamed at him.

'Grapevine, sir. And really, we wouldn't have said anything that harsh ourselves, you know that. If it makes you feel any better, our Nav reprimanded them both for failing in courtesy towards a brother officer,' Hruthhal reported.

'Lieutenant, before you get thoroughly sidetracked-' by either drawing your blaster and executing him on the spot or drowning in your own bile, whichever comes first, Falldess thought - 'there are certain things I would like to ask the Gunner's Mate here.'

At that point, a flushed looking Dordd pushed the door open and walked in. He looked like he had been living on a diet of lemons, Hruthhal thought: sour, irritated expression, thinner than usual. Hruthhal and the two officers stood to attention.

'Commander Falldess, CPO.' He acknowledged them, waved them to their seats. 'Thank you, lieutenant, you can go now.'

'Sir,' he said, 'I wish to press charges against GM1 Hruthhal, of indiscipline, insubordination and disrespect,' he said, rigidly formal.

Falldess watched Dordd control his expression, with difficulty. He could not call one of his own junior officers a raging halfwit in front of the commander of another ship, and a senior ranker from his own old command. However much he wanted to.

Then again, Dordd thought, what was the point of being a captain if you couldn't make your wishes felt? 'I'll take it under consideration. Go.' He pointed at the door.

'But, Captain, he really has gone too far-'

'Are you disobeying an order now, too? Out.'

The young lieutenant left, and Dordd turned to study the two that were left.

'Commander, you understand that Captain of the Line Lennart has asked me to review the information you retrieved in his absence?'

'I more than half expected to have to account for the loss of my ship,' Falldess admitted.

'Tarazed Meridian is going to be repaired under crash priority. As for your actions,' Dordd said, sounding sterner than he felt, if only through trying not to appear a fraud; he had been in charge, of this - floating zoo, he thought, for maybe one percent of the time she had spent in charge of a ship.

'You destroyed a medium, damaged a light frigate and set up another, for the cost of severe localised damage to a heavy frigate. You broke even; there are others who have done far worse.' Dordd tried to sound authoritative; he was uneasily aware that he might be one of them before long.

'It's the fact that we were not previously aware that we were at war with your opponents that Captain Lennart has deputised me to enquire into. Do you have your datacards?'

'Log? Right here, Sir.' Falldess handed over the datacard with her ship's sensor data on it. Dordd plugged it in to the holoprojector built into the table; they watched the incident replay itself.

Dordd felt distinctly envious. She was rough-tongued and demanding, but her crew jumped when she said to, and did reasonably well - not perfect, but sufficient. He did see why Lennart was worried.

'You left the search pattern and moved to engage on the strength of a gut feeling. No logic whatsoever, a snap decision - that turned out to be right, but you gave yourself too little time to plan, jumped in too close and stayed too long. It came down to you because there was no time to consult, but there was time to think it out more thoroughly. What you do may be driven by instinct, but how it is done must be thought through.

'Ten seconds, even - long enough to assess the enemy and the threat they posed to you, and position accordingly. Not in the way of a swarm of planet killers would have been a good start.' Dordd said.

'I had a duty to my people and my planet. Perhaps I could have done it more elegantly, at less cost, but you did say that you thought I had made the right decision.'

Note to self, Dordd thought, stop leaving hostages to fortune. 'Hruthhal?'

He had been looking at the external data, the ship's sensor picture. 'The fighters are familiar, they're the key. Notice - no ejections. Under LTL fire there wouldn't be many, but here there were none.

'No survivors to be interrogated. Here, the part after you had been hit; watch the retreating ship, and the wreck. The life pods; not all of them function. Some must have been too badly concussed. The minelayer performs retrieval on as many as it can, then opens fire on the rest.' Falldess looked in horror at that, then reminded herself what they were dealing with.

'Worse,' Hruthhal went on, 'unless they're using markerless turbolasers, some - these three pods here, here and here - self destruct. No-one to tell the tale. Sir, I bet that if you were to go back to the predicted position of that wreck and the bombardment drone swarm, you'd find nothing but a cloud of plasma.'

'That depends,' Dordd said slowly, thinking, 'on whether their politicians can react quickly enough to send out a clean-up crew fast enough to be done and away, before we can catch them in the act. Com-scan,' he raised his voice and the internal network caught it and routed his words, 'get me Group Captain Vehrec on the Voracious. Excuse me.' He said to the two still at the table, went into one of the side rooms to arrange it.

'Why are you here? Falldess asked Hruthhal.

'No disrespect intended, ma'am, but, well, I'm the closest thing we've got to a specialist in faking it,' Hruthhal admitted.

'We've come up with entire nonexistent battles before now, for the amusement and diversion of Rebel intelligence. I think Captain Dordd thought, well, in case the evidence had been gilded a little bit?'

'I think I understand why that lieutenant wanted you shot,' Falldess said, dryly. She would decide whether to let her anger loose in a moment. 'Are you seriously suggesting that I made this up?'

'No, ma'am - that they did. Would you really do something this inherently dubious, this likely to bring retribution, under your own colours? Would anyone with the sense and expertise to do it fail to take precautions against being caught?'

Falldess tried to think about it. I have just done a terrible thing, she imagined, of great future profit to myself and my kind. Am I going to be embarrassed? Ashamed? Not, she decided, if I have the stomach for such a thing in the first place. I'm certainly not going to want to get caught. Badly enough to be willing to blow myself up?

These beings - why don't they migrate? Exploit empty, unclaimed space - there are more than enough barren lands. Fear. They think the universe might be out to get them - and if it finds out what they've been doing, it will.

They want to move slowly, carve their way outwards. Eliminate the threats as they go. Would they resort to open war if they thought they had a chance? Have they, in the past? I need to find out more about them.

As a military operation, it would be inconceivable to do something that momentous and bloody under someone else's flag.

The crews would need to know that their people and their civilisation were behind them…they would probably need the full weight of service discipline to make them go through with it, for that matter.

This was not necessarily a conventional operation of war, though; it could be political, and that put it a hair's breadth away from piracy and all its tricks. In that case it was reasonable to expect a false flag, and all available forms of deception. The elimination, even the self-elimination, of anyone capable of talking was a strange pointer. In her experience a band of pirates might be that careless of each other's skins, but not their own.

Not random hirelings. Somebody organised, a Cause that they cared enough about to die for.

Something solid enough to gain vengeance on.

'Commander? This bit, here.' Hruthhal caught her attention. It was one of the earlier hits, one of the MTL.

Apparently it had torn up part of the command frigate's hull badly enough that the compensator node had failed. The area around the direct hit was melted, but there was enough loose scrap metal and fittings from the compensator failure to draw conclusions from. And a couple of bodies. Small, about one meter thirty, asymmetric - septapodal, two legs and five arms. rRasfenoni.

'Can you tell,' she asked, 'if if what he's wearing is standard issue to their regular forces?' Forcing herself to be calm, and to judge on the evidence.

'That shape, I'd be surprised if anyone else made gear to fit them - checking now.' Hruthhal started an image library search, through the sector databank.

Dordd walked back into the main ready room. 'Why didn't Captain Lennart arrange that himself?' she asked him.

'Sidetracked dealing with the political situation. He has an excuse, he's a flag officer now, he has many duties, of which squaring things with our oversight and the sector group probably do come first. Why didn't you or I think of it?' Dordd asked.

'Ah, Captain?' Hruthhal said, trying to change the subject. 'The other reason I drew this detail? I was deputised to pass on a message, by word of mouth only, to yourself.' He glanced at Falldess.

Dordd was thinking about it when the com beeped. 'Captain? Com-Scan watch officer. Operational directive incoming from Black Prince.'

Dordd looked at Hruthhal, who shrugged. 'Just give me the gist of it.'

'It says, Captain, in the temporary absence of Captain of the Line Lennart you are acting squadron commander, and it authorises you to make a reconnaissance run in the direction of the rRasfenoni with the sweep line and elements of recon-A. It's issued under the hand of Commander Brenn, and authenticates.'

Falldess watched Dordd swallow his bile. He was not having a good day.

'On my authority, terminate the exercise. Leave the damage report and the charge sheets in my office.' He added, wearily. 'Was that the message?' He said to Hruthhal.

'Um - no, Captain. It was much more political than that.'

'Spit it out; she's a line commander. She'll need to know,' Dordd said, already sufficiently disgruntled.

'If you think it wise, Captain.' Hruthhal said, clearly meaning that he didn't. 'Captain of the Line Lennart has gone off to, the rRasfenoni seem to be in alliance with, well, the Alliance.

'We've seen them in company with rebel forces before. He's gone off to poison that, at least break up the relationship, at best get them shooting at each other. He asked us to send on any other information we managed to extract from the data.'

'So he does believe it was them,' Falldess said, almost crowing.

'Not quite, Commander, he, ah, it looks enough like them that if he uses that as a political bomb, the blast radius is big enough to do the damage he wants, even if it is a little off target,' Hruthhal metaphorised.

'The other part of it is, well, how did they manage to get away with it for so long? Look at the number of ecological disasters in the sector. Goes back to the republic but it's still happening now. We must be looking at extreme stupidity or active complicity on the part of the Sector government. We could end up shooting at them as well.'

'Glorious.' Dordd said, sarcastically. 'Nine Imperators, an Ordinator, a Proelium and an Urbanus light cruiser? Black Prince might be comfortable at those odds, but not this ship.'

'Mine in their hands for major repair,' Falldess pointed out. 'I suppose there is a certain advantage in conducting a cutting out operation on your own frigate.'

'As part of that,' Hruthhal continued, 'and as if it was something new, we're to avoid the ISB as far as possible.'

'Ah,' Falldess said. It was a 'what have I done' sort of ah, and Dordd picked up on it.

'Something you'd like to tell me?' Dordd asked her.

'Yes,' she admitted, meaning no, but no choice. 'I was very rude to my navigator in particular, during the action. I apologised to him afterwards, but we thought about it and concocted a particular scheme. Tell me, Captain, have you noticed anything strange about the behaviour of HIMS Obdurate?'

'Not strongly enough to think it worth concocting a scheme, no,' Dordd said. He had, but he had been too absorbed in the strange behaviour of his own crew, and it was Vehrec's problem anyway, as the line commander.

Falldess had been well off reservation in doing anything of the sort, interfering with the internal order of another officer's command, and that could be an offence, but Dordd suspected there was worse to come.

'We guessed that there was some form of political observer looking over Lieutenant-Commander Raesene's shoulder, and decided to bait them. My nav, Senior Lieutenant Alurin, tempted them with the possibility of bearing witness against me, and they took the bait,' Falldess related.

'There is a fairly senior ISB investigation team on board that ship, we know now, here to collect evidence against the squadron in general and Captain of the Line Lennart in particular.'

'A lunatic risk well taken.' Dordd decided, thinking about what he could do about it. There were a range of options, stretching from having them arrested and shot to being on best behaviour and hoping they would go away. He was thinking about the charges that could be brought against a pair of self-invited civilians and what legal cover they would have, when Hruthhal added

'It gets kind of worse, Sir, Ma'am. There might be something for them to investigate; we have a pretty fair idea that our political overseer has a private agenda, which, ah, may not be in the best interests of the Empire. We might have to shoot Kor Alric, too.'

'Is firing at it your solution to every problem?' Falldess asked him.

'Gunnery, ma'a,.' Hruthhal tapped the patch on his shoulder. 'We usually find a way to make it apply.'

Why me? Dordd asked himself. Because you're in charge, it's your job to deal with this mess. Just because the buck stopped with him didn't stop him asking 'why me?', especially when it felt as if the buck had decided to keep going and run straight over him.

'Today,' he decided, 'has not been a good day. Tomorrow should be better, it'd have to work at being worse.'

'Sir, in the name of the Galactic Spirit please don't say things like that,' Hruthhal asked. 'We can't shoot Fate.'

'I second that,' Falldess said. 'In fact, I can think of one very real possibility; if the rRasfenoni decide to expiate their crimes and patch up their relationship with the rebel Alliance, by dropping a swarm of those planet-killers on the squadron as we sit here at anchor.'

'Another challenge to be met,' Dordd said, trying to summon up reserves of authority, 'Most of your light forces are intact, we'll need a perimeter and patrol line, Commander Falldess I think you had better return to your ship and alert your line. Don't get arrested, don't start any private wars. If you can help it.'


	32. Chapter 32

The conference room in Obdurate's lower bridge tower was designed for twenty people clustered round a display set; with two men there, the lights dimmed and the table off, it felt very empty. It looked like there were two ghouls hunched over a corpse, gnawing at it - which was not that wild an analogy really, the senior agent thought. There was something ghoulish about the job.

'What does this give us? How do we use it?' he asked, semi-rhetorically. 'Is this not clear proof that Captain Lennart is condoning failure, and encouraging or at least forgiving irresponsible adventurism, and disregarding of orders in favour of a personality cult? Is this still not enough?'

The senior agent sat, thinking. Why did I agree to take my sister's youngest along, he asked himself. He's an insult to the genetic profile, must take after his father - at least he comes in useful for good cop, bad cop.

'You're right,' he encouraged his nephew, 'it is proof, but it is all navy proof. These are all things done against the good order of the Starfleet; technically it may be enough for a court martial, but we need a civil trial.'

'Why? I thought you wanted to take him on and beat him on his own home ground.'

'That was rhetoric. Just trying to prod Lieutenant-Commander Raesene into a more productive attitude.' He looked at young Dorind with exasperation. 'Do you understand the fundamental problem here? He didn't, to begin with. He does now, which could be a source of difficulty.'

'If the men of the Starfleet are this reluctant to accept the authority of the New Order, then that serves as condemnation enough.'

'One of these days I am going to have 'ulterior motive' tattooed on your eyelids, my young apprentice, in luminous ink so that the message burns itself into your brain while you sleep. You don't seem able to take it in while you're awake.'

His uncle's sarcasm simply rolled off the young operative's back; he had heard it all before. 'What else do you call it?'

'A catspaw. Why would Lieutenant Alurin come to us? How did he really know to come to us?'

'You didn't believe him?' The young man said, surprised.

'Oh, I believe the details, but the circumstances seem too good to be true.'

'How can you say that?' the young man exploded. 'This is exactly what we need! This is success, completion. This is our ticket out of here.'

'Possibly into a Navy trash compactor,' the senior agent said. 'Exactly what we seem to need is being offered to us on a plate, and such gifts always make me wish I had a food taster.  
'Do we stand to gain anything - anything at all - from reporting Lennart to his own parent unit? Their reputation is not far short of his. Would they behave properly, or would they cover it up - which means dianogas at dawn for us? I think they would cover. That leaves higher authority, or the sector fleet.'

'So we need to get a message out of here to Sector. Before they move against us,' Dorind said.

'Then what? Time for some more...tactical conversation,' the senior agent said, avoiding the word "lies". 'Do we arrest Captain Lennart? Has he, in fact, done anything against the Empire as a whole? There are rumours, but there are always rumours. Arranging a fake defection to gain tactical intelligence, that I could believe. It's not necessarily a bad thing.  
'On the other hand, I can picture the scene quite exactly - we board, and make it approximately two metres across that ship's hangar bay before he has his crew gun us down. I do not think that would be very productive.'

'What about Falldess? She's a woman-'

'Very perceptive of you,' the senior agent commented, dryly. 'Her crew might be willing to bear witness against her, but the Starfleet, for undermining discipline - that would cut both ways. Do you feel expendable for the greater good?'

'Um-' the younger agent said. 'Now hold on a minute here, this is family, you can't-'

'Then do try to stop coming up with plans that would get you expended,' he reprimanded his nephew. 'We have to find - or spin up - a sufficiently drastic charge that it passes beyond the Starfleet's competence to prosecute.'

'What about letting the Millennium Falcon escape?' Dorind asked.

'On the orders of a special agent of the council. Besides which, lots of Imperial officers have done that. It's becoming something of a tradition,' the senior field agent said. 'Speaking of plans that involve being expendable, have you thought who stands to gain by having this task force tied down in legalities?'

'We're thinking factions here?'

'Yes. Why are you surprised? We all seek to get ahead, and who is there to get ahead of except one another? One of the reasons it is always worth thinking carefully before accepting a touchy job - balancing advancement for success against the risks, of failure and of jealousy. Have you made any enemies yet?'

'Only the enemies of the state,' the younger man said. Sounded confident enough, but was there a glimmer of sense starting to form?

'You may wish to look very carefully at the people who call themselves your friends before saying that,' the senior agent pointed out.

'Anyway, we could drop this into the hands of the sector fleet, which would be glad of it, but - hmmm. Yes, I think that would be worth doing. As a preliminary attack. They should be sufficiently jealous of him that, even if Region does quash the charges, the fallout would open up so many more avenues of attack that-' the terminal beeped at him.  
'Hmm,' he said, reading fast. An order that he had used his access to have copied to him. 'A movement order for this ship. By the hand of - Captain Lennart is absent from his command?  
'Ah, now, this could matter. This could be exceeding useful. What a perfect moment for an arrest. We need to get this to Sector as soon as possible.'

'Skipper?' Vilberksohn asked, sounding worried. 'Are you sure you know how to fly this thing? That was a pretty ropy takeoff.'

In theory, Lennart had every right to crush him beneath the iron heel of military discipline. In practise - he had to admit the charge chief probably had a point. Or rather, the shuttle nearly had after it had come within a wingspan of carrying away the com antennae from the main control tower.

'Well, I had a flight certification for Lambda class shuttles, Delta JV-7s aren't that different,' Lennart lied slightly. In fact, he would have felt justified to roast anyone who he caught joyriding like this.

'Had?' Aleph-3 asked, from the prime gunner's seat. The Delta escort shuttles had a flight crew of six, pilot, flight engineer/copilo t- currently Vilberksohn - com/scan, first gunner for the remote-steered rear heavy turret, two front gunners for the ARC-170 like wingroot pivots.

The covering party were loyal enough, that was the reason why he had picked them from the pool of available volunteers, but Lennart could sense them thinking, aha, future blackmail material.

'To forestall any further speculation,' he said, 'I have a civil Grade Two private pilot's license for YT-1210, 1250 and 1300 series, from the year 10, and a military certification for Lambda class dating from '19.'

'Requalification is every five years, isn't it?' somebody asked from the rear cabin. Requin, one of the ship's clerks: a useful fixer and obtainer of semi-official stores. Lennart suspected he had come along in the hope of making a useful contact.

'For a noncombat type.' Dammernorph, technically an Imperial Army first sargeant, Alpha squadron's chief armourer. Huge man, well over two hundred kilos, but the precision he could get out of those blocky fingers of his was amazing. So was his energy, considering his other activities - he had at least five wives that Lennart knew of.

'Most of you were paying attention; you heard what happened,' Lennart reminded them. 'There are certain advantages to not being officially capable of being here.' It might not matter all that much, considering he had left a flight plan with Black Prince's nav computers and left instructions as to how he could be contacted in case of emergency.

'I have a current civil Grade Three,' Aleph-3 said.

'Not until you satisfy my curiosity on one or two points first,' Lennart said, then noticed the discussion back in the troop bay was still going on. He listened, for a moment.

'Considering how often professional, trained pilots bend these things-'

'Dam, give it a rest. You're just grouchy because you didn't get a chance to screw that waitress.'

'Well, considering that would involve another landing and takeoff, would you really want to go back?' Lennart said loudly enough to be heard in the bay.

'No, Sir, sorry Sir,' Dammernorph said, a shade too quickly.

'Besides which, you heard what happened. No-one else I could send to do anything that unlikely. And unless you have really well hidden talents, there's no-one else up to the job of taking this bucket through hyperspace.'

'Ahem,' Aleph-3 coughed.

'And you are exactly the person I ought to be talking to on the subject of hidden talents,' Lennart continued, to her. 'You have quite a range of them - tell me, under what circumstances do they come to the fore?'

'I don't quite understand…' she said, looking round at the covering party.

'You can do a lot of things, more than I'd expect to be able to fit into your head. Interrogator, investigator, sniper, and then there are the cover identities; second hand speeder saleswoman, deep sea mollusc harvester, crime journalist, cybermechanic, websphere coach - it's the alternate personalities of the cover identity that fascinate me, and how you manage to integrate them all.'

'I…' Aleph-3 hesitated. Lennart knew he had struck a nerve.

'You see,' Lennart continued, probing, 'I don't understand how you can manage to piece them all together.'

She thought about it. Pass it all off with 'it's just method acting, really' - or actually give him the answer he was fishing for? What did he want to do to her? Did she actually want to stop him?  
'I do find it…easier to link the practical and the social aspects of a cover identity together,' she admitted. 'I don't think I would be able to function in my designed role unless I did export parts of myself accordingly.'

'Should we leave the two of you alone, Captain?' Vilberksohn asked, edging away from them in his seat.

'No. I may need you to sit on her if she loses it,' Lennart said.

'I do not "lose it", as you so charmingly put it, Captain. And I am very particular about who I let sit on me,' she said, changing tone from matter of fact to outright seduction and eyeing him as if she wanted to eat him.

'There,' Lennart said, trying to remain calm, 'that change of note there is exactly what I mean. You went from ramrod-spined to raunch in an eyeblink. Do you do that deliberately? Consciously, even? Whenever you're trying to think outside the box, whenever you encounter a situation in your proper persona that one of your cover identities would be good for, it tends to come to the fore,' Lennart opined.

She shrugged, then smiled at him. 'So I'm dynamically unstable.'

'Knock it off, you're not going to win my heart with dodgy aerodynamics. You're still basically a Stormtrooper, aren't you?'

'Cloned and bred, Sir. But, are you suggesting that I'm deliberately repressing my wilder moments, in order to remain within the standard-issue mental frame?'

'I'm suggesting that psychologically, you're a deep sea mollusc's breakfast. You're trying to brainwash yourself-' so am I, trying not to stare at her breasts in that dress, Lennart added to himself - 'but it doesn't work. Your mind doesn't want to do that, and unassimilated bits keep bubbling up to the surface.'

'So…' she said, thinking. Was that fair comment? Was that really the way things were - she was an amateur psychologist, not a professional.

No. On one level, it was obvious - and offensive - nonsense. She was a stormtrooper, and had been raised and trained as one- assuming there was some separation between the two concepts. Training had been confused; at times it had felt as if the geonosians didn't quite know what to do with them. They had eventually evolved an appropriate scheme of allowing them to transgress the boundaries, but then requiring them to atone by demonstrating good behaviour, as per the standards laid down for Line One, Mod One. Latitude and correction, like being on an elastic leash, let roam but reeled in every time - it had been an effective way of allowing them to grow in ability without allowing them to grow much in maturity.

The most dubious part of her upbringing, and the part she had most difficulty faking, was growing up. With the senior batches of her own line playing surrogate-mother, a duty she had never enjoyed or been good at when it fell to her turn- being a military clone was a stunted childhood. No matter how capable you became, you always remained emotionally dependent on the system, never really left the nest.

Lennart sat there, watching her as she thought it through.

Is that what he's afraid of? She thought. Playing Pygmalion? Being a surrogate father? He's no celibate. He has taken lovers - and spawned a few illegitimate children, I'll bet - but admit it. Isn't that the reason I want him? So that he can be my rock to support me as I grow, challenger, master, confessor, protector and friend rolled into one? That's a lot to ask of a normal man. Then again, what would I want about a normal man? He's more than that. A leader, a man of determination, and strong in the Force.

What does he want from me? She wondered. He always took me seriously, at least as a threat. He's not just after me for my body - any of me would give him that much.

How badly am I projecting? Misreading him, and seeing what I want to see? On the face of things, very badly. He - if he thought in the same terms, we would have -

And who am I to think such things, anyway? Who am I to dare such? He is my captain, and he is Authority - whom I have already said some exceeding strange things to, and of. One of the reasons I want him to have the Force, so he can look at me and see how much I want him.

But - am I misestimating myself? What if he's actually right, and I am a functional dissociative, not someone he could-

'Do you think I could have done anything like that,' she asked him, desperately casting aside her own line of thought, 'if I could have managed any other way?'

'If that was what you had to do,' he said, gently, acceptingly, and she wondered how much of that was genuine and how much a part he himself was playing, 'then how can I help you now? I believe that you can do things differently. That you can change and grow.' He put his hand on her shoulder, and she nearly went berserk with rage at the modesty of the gesture.

She wanted to pull him out of his seat, throw him to the deck, leap on him and ravish him; she couldn't, not here, not in the presence of twenty odd assorted representatives of the lower deck- was that actually his plan? Force her to do something wild and demonstrative, make a rash romantic gesture - but she already had, in deciding to side with him after all, hadn't she? Or was he cold blooded enough - no, part of her decided - to consider that merely duty, this over and above?

She was looking at him, looking into his eyes and trying to read them - also trying to signal 'come and get me, lover boy'- when Vilberksohn coughed and pointed at Lennart's panel.

'Skipper, are those red dots anything to do with us?'

Lennart glanced down at them, ran a brief scan, said, 'Depends just how wild a coincidence you're prepared to believe in. Sulmarr, com Black Prince, tell them destination system T-20443 in the files, RA +11, 2, 04, 254, on the ecliptic, heading outsystem, fighter support now. Everybody else, battle stations.'

'What are we supposed to do?' A voice from the back of the shuttle asked.

'Hope and pray that I really do know how to fly this thing,' Lennart said.

Black Prince's fighter direction centre was moderately busy. One small exercise running, and a couple of dozen of the individual sim tanks in the annex in use - mostly non-pilots playing computer games.

The duty officer was the Surface Transport Wing commander; technically a transferee from the Stormtrooper Corps, he knew a crash-action order when he heard one. Anybody too preoccupied to specify exactly what sort of support they needed was probably in deep stang. Nu squadron's new Sentinels were on plus five; better add something heavier.

Who was up to strength? Avenger and Starwing replacements had just come in - that should do. One flight each Beta and Epsilon. He sent out the order, turned to notify the bridge, and did not notice one of his junior temporary controllers float away quietly in the direction of the flight bay.

One of the replacement fighters that had just come in was a rather interesting variant; it wasn't actually due to be issued for some days yet, but it had been assembled and checked out. Not easy climbing out of a hoverchair into a cockpit, but under the circumstances, possible.

The escort shuttle was significantly faster and more responsive than the Lambda, which was in itself overpowered and overarmed for the vast majority of its duties. There were landers and transports based on TIE style hulls that really were not much more than cargo containers with engines, but nine tenths of the Lambdas never did anything more exciting than onboard delivery anyway. Which was a shame, considering how easily they could be refitted into a heavy escort fighter to protect TIE bomber streams. Lennart was reacquainting himself with the type, testing how easily it pitched and rolled.

His general course was out; the planet should get what help to him it could, but the main chance was to stay out and stay alive long enough for Black Prince's fighters to intervene.

Response time - ten minutes at least. They could run, draw it out into a stern chase that would be their best chance. Focus, Lennart was telling himself, try to stop sweating, it doesn't inspire confidence.

If I was comfortably on my bridge, com'ing instructions to an incoming shuttle being pursued by Rebels, what advice would I give? 'Hold still so the LTL can fire past you' doesn't really apply.

Head in the direction of maximum safety, but at these speeds, don't expect to make it - at least in theory, but…the enemy were four flights strong; one of R-41s, only barely faster, three of the standard rRasfenoni types- one bomber flight, trundling along, two of fighters- which did have the speed.

They weren't using it, though; sticking close to the presumably missile armed attack craft.

Missile salvo incoming, then. Harrass the bombers with the aft long gun, then just outside accurate gun range, start to turn to bear, expose the forward guns for point defence fire, then accelerate into the attack and go for the bombers.

'Fire as soon as you think you have a shot,' he told Aleph-3, swaying the shuttle slightly to confuse their targeters a little, buy extra seconds.

She opened fire almost immediately, picking the lead bomber and firing a burst of six shots in rapid succession; the fourth and fifth shots hit. The fourth blew away the thin shields and tore one wing off - the fifth was a solid hit on the fuselage that ruptured the powerplant; that sent up the torpedoes.

'Good shooting,' Lennart said. Trying to remember how to set the power flow to serve the guns. Not yet. It would be time soon.

'Beginner's luck,' Aleph-3 said, lining up on the next.

Think about it, Lennart told himself. I'm an amateur pilot. Hyperspace is one thing - I could lead them such a dance there, I could probably still do a course in my head if I tried, given half an hour and a slide rule. Although that was on a bet, and I did cheat.

Sublight - and if we want to kill them, that's what it'll have to be, my best chance is to use my superior judgement as a naval officer to avoid having to depend on my inferior skill as a flight suit insert as long as possible.

So how come I feel relatively comfortable doing this? Never mind the joystick - and a competent flight engineer to back me up - what a suicidally inconvenient time this would be to start feeling the touch of the Force.

Although it was utterly absurd that so many Jedi had become combat pilots, it was an undeniable fact. An attitude of mind less likely to produce the hunting instincts of a fighter jock would be hard to find, but the dexterity, speed of reaction and foresight the Force gave them seemed to make it almost inevitable.

At this range, the rebs can shoot, but they can't land enough fire on target to push the shields below regeneration rate. If they fan out and jink to avoid our fire, that costs them time.

Concentrate; don't be daft enough to let the Force sucker you into thinking you have a chance in a dogfight.  
'Shame that there's nothing larger,' he said, trying to cheer the crew up. 'Then we could at least have docked and boarded. One down.'

Aleph-3 was leaning into her board as if trying to physically bring them nearer, scattering fire across the formation to see who was an easy and who a hard target; she fired a long burst at one who had been play-acting - made themselves look like an easy target to draw fire away from the rest and then broke into radical evasion, darting and twisting out of the line of shot. Aleph-3 was about to change target when Lennart said, 'Stay on him; he's probably the squadron leader.'

'I'm wasting power. The rest of them are going to get clear shots,' she said.

'The percentages in killing off their coordinator are better,' Lennart said, bluntly, noting that she had in fact kept on target. By the time she had nailed the R-41, the rest were almost ready to launch.

Eighteen concussions. Enough? Possibly, at face value, yes. At a realistic hit rate, no. Aleph-3 shot two of them.

'Stay on the bombers.' He ordered. Time later for that.

His hand kept twitching on the joystick; kept wanting to spin the shuttle and accelerate at them, ride them down and turn it into a proper furball. It was as bad as controlling a nervous tic. One more bomber exploded; four more missiles that would probably go wild.

Then he gave in to temptation and still accelerating, shoved the joystick forward in a diving loop and levelled out facing into the attack.

'Front gunners, take them.'

Aleph-3 looked at him; she was positively beaming, despite the fact that he had just masked her gun. He was listening to the Force - which probably meant he was doing it wrong. Crap.

Lennart flew; taking snapshots whenever the bow of the shuttle pointed directly at a target, otherwise turning and twisting to throw off targeting and break locks. The other two did the work. One of the bombers and two of the fighters died before they got close enough. 'I'm going evasive, go to antimissile fire.'

The force was tickling away at the shuttle's shields; light autoblasters useful against Clone War era fighters and Imperial TIEs, not much use against an armoured, shielded shuttle. Tickling was the right word. They needed the R-41's lasers to bite, or consistent missile hits.

'I think they've called for reinforcements,' Sulmarr said from the com-scan seat.

'See whose get here first,' Lennart said, aiming for one of the '41's. Not much point flying a stable course - the shuttle's autotrack could keep the guns in play. Better to jink, in fact.

Spraying green pulses of light, the heavy shuttle twisted into the missile swarm. Eighteen launched, twelve now relying on their own targeters. Four might hit.

One of the front gunners was picking the missiles that showed constant bearing; the other hadn't thought of that. Six guided - four or five probable hits. Not fun. Last split second, clearest path; malfunction, you bastard, Lennart thought at one missile as he deliberately turned into another. Fratricide. Accelerate to meet one, touch it off, take it on the shields - and hopefully the blast would knock down some of its brothers. Then ride out the loose blast pattern, push though it and into the furball after all.

The warhead he had been thinking at detonated. The blast wave touched off four of them, the hit he had taken deliberately spoilt another one. Three hits, effectively. Not enough to breach the shields.

The fighters were on them, though; right-handed inverse falling leaf, twisting out of the way of most of the first shower of fire - splashes over the now-equalised shields. The rRasfenoni fighters starbursted around them, fanning out to match velocities and englobe. As per pre-war procedure.

'They've got it wrong, told you it was worth nailing the leader,' Lennart said, hauling the shuttle round for all front guns to bear on the last of the bombers, holding it steady as it kicked under a splatter of laser fire.

'Chaos works for them, a structured fight for us, they lost their commander so they default to the book which says structure.'

One of the R-41s swooped in to take out the tail turret; Lennart turned so he was dead astern and gave him a faceful of ion, burnt down the shielding. Aleph-3 added insult to injury by spraying him in the belly as he broke away.

Without entirely knowing why, he focused all the shields on the upper port sector and rolled 120° to port; the outer skin of the armoured shuttle crackled and hissed as the blaster fire scarred it, but there as a mighty thump as one of the light fighters played inadvertent kamikaze.

Quickly equalise them before the remaining bomber rippled off another four missiles, continue the roll into a corkscrew. Dammit, Lennart thought, I might actually be some good at this.

Emergence flash; Lennart looked at the com/scan board. 'Ours or theirs?'

'Theirs. Corellian corvette and escort.'

'They can't do this to me; I'm a shareholder,' Lennart said, and got a chuckle. 'Plan: we match velocity and use the ejectable cockpit module as an icebreaker. Breach the hull, around the escape pods, and board her.'

Aleph-3 was beaming; the rest ranged from expressions of near panic to bring it on. Lennart thought it was suicidal.

There was a second set of flashes. Relief, that was their support. The new fighters curved towards the shuttle, the Imperial fighters moved to intercept. Heavy laser fire cracked out, proton torps reached for the corvette; Starwings. Good. Except one seemed to be having trouble with its torpedoes. No shot, and it was skid-turning in their direction - both the two remaining R-41s vanished. Light turbolaser fire had a way of making fighters do that.

Lennart accelerated the Delta JV-7 away from the rRasfenoni corvette, clearing the line of fire and drawing the fighters out so they could be intercepted.

The heavy gun fighter took aimed shots at three of them, one after the other, three instant kills, before breaking away to avoid the surge of Sentinels heading in to cover the shuttle.

It turned towards the Corvette; sideslipped and opened fire with a long burst, tracking across the blue-grey painted hull, burning into the shielding and drawing defensive fire away from the incoming torps. It was forced to break off and go evasive, too late for the Corvette to cover herself.

Thirty torpedoes amounted to a killing salvo; especially with the shields already weakened, the twenty-four fired turned out to be more than enough. The corvette came apart, then what must have been an onboard self-destruct charge detonated.  
A blazing white point of light, and then there was nothing left.

Such of the rRasfenoni were still able to turned to flee to hyperspace; not many of them made it. The big gun fighter flew up to visual range alongside the shuttle. PulsarWing; the thick-winged, faired gun pod version of the Starwing.

'Rahandravell,' Lennart commed across, 'What the kriff do you think you were doing?'

'Sorry, Captain,' Franjia's voice came back. 'It seemed the right thing to do. How did you know it was me?'

'I didn't know, but you were at the head of the list of suspects,' Lennart confirmed, dryly.

'Did the idea that you could get away with discharging yourself from light duties, walk away from your assigned post, essentially steal a flight test article, and get yourself forgiven by going and playing hero with it – did you plan that, or was it a spur of the moment thing?'

'Ah. I'm in trouble, ain't I?'

'You and lots and lots of other people, starting with the idiot - or the traitor - who leaked our position to the rRasfenoni. All fighters,' Lennart looked them over, three damaged, none badly, 'form up on the shuttle and take your nav data from me.' He started plotting the route home, to be interrupted by Aleph-3, who turned to him eyes shining.

'You used the Force. You called upon it, and it came to you.' She sounded high, drunk on delight.

'I know,' Lennart said grimly. 'As if things couldn't get any worse.'

HIMS Voracious and her close escort group emerged from hyperspace just behind the predicted position of the remaining debris; they would be watching it as it receded, which they had decided was better than being dead in front, because that might happen all too literally. Not the best position, but enough.

It had been sheer bloody fluke that Tarazed Meridian- now frantically having her main reactor sawn out- had come across them in the first place. A false flag would have been secondary to security though manoeuvre; they had a contingency plan, but they hadn't really been expecting to get caught.

Sending out a cleanup crew had been an afterthought, too. It was the same combination of layer/retriever and escort, but the escort they had sent to do it was a spectacularly unlikely choice - a SoroSuub Liberator "Heavy Cruiser"; in practise a medium-heavy frigate, well armed, massive troop and fighter complements for its class, but it bought them at the price of being equally massively overloaded. They were in the same acceleration range as the Dreadnaught, if not worse.

The Liberator was moving at low speed, paralleling the retrieval ship in a series of short hyperspace hops to intercept any ship approaching the area at normal velocity. They would have been expecting light patrol forces, a Corellian Corvette, Bayonet maybe, at worst a Carrack. A Venator destroyer-carrier and escorts were not part of their game plan.

Voracious turned to bear, initially presenting her main battery. Stang, Vehrec thought. How do I handle this one? He watched the emerging menagerie of attack craft as the Liberator prepared to make a standup fight of it. Two squadrons of old Kuat Systems CloakShapes - probably the fully uprated type with the lasers and launchers. Two squadrons of Y-wings, which meant little as any fool could get their hands on Y-wings, but that would be a possible ID problem. One squadron of T-wings, the rejected rebel design gone third party. The last of the six squadrons were a rare breed, Starypan/Sunhui Razor fighters, the supposed successor to the R-41. Sort of like being a hereditary bin man.

Well. They, meaning Lennart, had given him a ship, and not so much a wing as permission to use what he had and the promise of more, and why the kriff not? Time to be somewhere else; he announced to the fighter bridge in general, 'Magnum launch. Everything we have a pilot for, we'll sort it out when we get there.'

'Affirmative, Group Captain. And?' One of the flight controllers said, pointedly.

'Stang. Forgot. Call general quarters.'

On the ship's bridge, Caliphant was looking around for a soft wall he could bang his head off of. What were they supposed to do now?

It was a common enough procedure for Venators to be commanded by the ranking starfighter corps officer, and he had looked over the last set of standing orders from when Voracious had been a serving combat carrier, but it would be good to know exactly what the ship was supposed to be doing.

'Group Captain Vehrec?' he said, the com system automatically finding him.

'Yes?' the voice came back.

'What are we supposed to be doing?'

That was a smenging strange question, on the face of it. What was Caliphant on about? He couldn't be suffering from combat fatigue already. 'Enemy. Thing to shoot at. Mass fire for fun and profit. Yes?'

He's a group captain, Caliphant reminded himself. Two and a half grades above me. 'How are we going to fight this? We can't just make up capital ship tactics as you go along.'

'Why not?' Vehrec said. 'Works for me.'

'Not,' Caliphant said, keeping his voice level with difficulty, 'for a ship this big. What is your plan for the wing?'

'React, anticipate, generally play it by ear. What does the situation look like from up there?' Vehrec asked him.

'You're not on your bridge? Where-' silly question, Caliphant realised as soon as he said it.

'In the turbolift on the way down to the bay,' Vehrec said, to the sounds of changing into a flight suit.

Caliphant made a mental note to have display screens fitted to all bridge turbolifts. Then again, the abstract approach had borne results in the past. There was one of the destroyer captains of the Death Squadron supposed to be there because he had taken on a rebel Dreadnaught medium frigate from his bathtub. Nerrik? Ferral? Something like that. And there was a persistent rumour that it had been the toilet seat, anyway.

Suddenly Caliphant's temper boiled over. 'This isn't some kriffing game of Clue! Is this going to be a fighter led strike? One or two phase? Bomber led, and heavy or light, close or distant CAP? Long range gun bombardment? Close quarters tumbling match? Leave you to it and pursue the minelayer?  
'I can kill you with friendly fire, I can get you killed by leaving your ass hanging out in the breeze, I think you can agree that those would be bad things? I need to know.'

Well, Vehrec thought, he could be on to something. He also thought he heard Caliphant mutter 'how come I have to be the straight man. I'm not cut out to be the sensible one.'

The answer was pretty much inevitable, though. 'I'll take the group in, burn through their fighters on the way and try to take that thing in enough pieces for the Intel boys to have fun with. Shoot past us if you get a clear line of fire, and send- oh, Obdurate and half the escorts after the minelayer.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Caliphant acknowledged, thinking if we can win on this for a strategy, we can win on anything.

The turbolift reached the upper bay, and from there it was as intuitive a thing as remembering how to walk. Into the cockpit, abbreviated crash pre-flight; how he hated that term, but it was the official term for precisely that reason, to emphasise the danger of taking shortcuts.

All green, up and away, leading his motley assortment of instructors, trainees, retreads and wannabes.

The rebels were willing to make a standup fight of it, at least, although they must have been at least a little bit perplexed by the numbers and variety of the Imperial fighter force.

Vehrec could afford to be casual, because this was second nature to him. He mentally divided his fighters into four wings, first and second line fighter, first and second line bomber. As each squadron came out, they were ordered to join the stream. He was leading the first line fighters himself, burning slowly towards the rebels at three hundred 'g', enough to separate them out, not too fast for the laggards to join up with. The first line bombers were doing the same, but slower, two hundred 'g', the second line fighters one hundred, the second line bombers fifty.

First line fighters were his own Avengers, the two squadrons of bomber winged proto-avenger Assault class, and the interceptor variants – probably enough in and of themselves. Behind them, Caliphant had rotated the Voracious so her belly was showing, masking the fighter bay to prevent any shot slipping through the doors that had turned out to be the Venator's primary design flaw.

The Liberator opened fire, a continuously adjusted ripple from six twenty-five teraton heavy turbolasers, relatively light compared to Black Prince's rapid thirty-twos or Voracious' own slow-firing seventies. Still enough to hurt a thinly shielded or poorly handled destroyer, though.

Hiding the fighter bay also meant hiding the guns, which gave the Liberator an uninterrupted shot. The frigate was now broadcasting a transponder signal that identified her as the "Tiger in the Night", not a known Rebel - well, until now.

She was making good practise at medium-long range, two hundred thousand kilometres and closing, landing four hits in her first ten seconds of fire, six in the second ten. ECM only went so far to protect a target that couldn't manoeuvre.

Nothing beyond a Venator's ability to take, not yet. Too much more would become a problem.

There was a minor crisis when one of the volunteers tried to open the lower bay door and use the mounted surface-artillery turbolaser.

The convergence dish meant that it wasn't bound by the admittedly generous constraints of a physical barrel. It could channel more power than a comparable gun tube; the lack of that barrel meant that it dispersed that much faster. They were point-blank crunch guns, and using it now would be a stupid move.

Vehrec heard the screaming on the second command channel, as the gun crew were told to stop the shooter who didn't seem to be listening. They had to mug him to stop him opening the lower bay door, and Vehrec mentally tuned out just as Caliphant was threatening the wayward gunner with being spreadeagled across the dish of his own gun.

The rebels were coming in two up, four back; Razors and T-wings leading - what they expected from a Venator he had no idea, but a fighter strike against a ship that carried twice as many fighters as anything else in its weight class was never bright. As far as he could tell, the rebel plan would be to break up the lead fighter elements, his first line, and then get in among the bombers.

Defensive, in other words - take out the threat to themselves.

The counter was equally straightforward; pick the moment, then accelerate forward into the attack with the first and second fighter wings, first at full and second at two thirds throttle to react in case of screwup, bombers to loiter and manoeuvre defensively.

Some of his pilots misheard and some misunderstood, but wolfpack instinct sufficed for most of them. The result was head on collision. In two cases, literally - one of the old Assaults shot a Razor; it broke up, but the razor's wingbeing deliberately rammed the Imperial fighter. One where neither side would break away.

The red and the green sheet of light passed through each other. For once, with their heavy translight fighters, the Imperials were more heavily shielded. Armament - again, advantage the Empire. Heavier guns on the Assault, more and better on the Avenger and Interceptors. It was the Rebel formation that cracked and starburst first.

Eight of the rebel first line died in the first pass, four of the Imperial, then the imperial first line pounded into the rebel bombers and the Imperial second fighter line took its opportunities.

That was Actis and Nimbus types, good dogfighters, maybe a shade too twitchy, maybe too lightly gunned, maybe their shield generators were nothing more than an expensive extra, but they made a superb manoeuvring reserve. They swarmed over the broken Rebel formation as the first line carved into the rebel bombers.

Bays empty, Voracious could dip her nose and bring her turrets to bear. The cloud of fighters in between - they, on the other hand, would be a problem. One that was rapidly being solved, but the rebel was a lot less shy about firing into fighter combat.

It kept rippling fire at the Venator, brought its ion cannon on line and added them too. Caliphant was trying to manoeuvre to get a clear line of fire to return the favour.

'Fighters Second, chase the rebs out of the way, then clear the line of fire. Fighter lead and both Bomb wings, formate on me,' Vehrec ordered.

Course: L-shaped attack out and away, then burn in towards the Tiger in the Night, achieving relative motion, but keeping the guns and launchers bearing. Standard flypast. Liberators were notoriously light on point defence, too; they depended on their fighter wing for that. As they closed, the bombers would fan out and englobe, threatening the frigate from multiple angles, forcing her to either take hits on unshielded hull or equalise her shields - losing her defensive focus on Voracious.

Unless they were in shock, the rebels could read a battlefield. Their opening gambit had been utterly smashed, and although the ship had been giving better than they got so far, that was going to change.

It did. The Tiger accelerated towards the Voracious, full throttle but not precisely head on - trying to duck under the light destroyer's belly, exposing her own main guns, still shooting. It was a move that made sense on two grounds: their ion wake probably was the most effective antifighter weapon they had left, and a close range, high aspect tumbling match was the best chance they had of doing damage to the Imperial ship.

On board the destroyer, an argument had broken out between Caliphant and Kirritaine, the gunnery officer. They had fired one full salvo, synchronised converged sheaf. As soon as the rebel frigate had felt the mass of targeters focus on her, she had gone on to full power evasion. The full volley, all eleven hundred and twenty teratons, crashed out and seared past the reb, wild and away a thousand kilometres off.

That was a huge miss by anyone's standards.

'What was that for?' Caliphant had him com'd. 'I don't care how pretty it looks; what matters is if it hits or not.'

'They can do it and they did it to us; it works.'

Oh, crap, Caliphant thought. 'They? Them? Us? Could you be a little more definitive?'

'The squadron exercises. Converged sheaf volleys, it's the way to go.'

Caliphant suspected he heard a 'whee!' in the background as the next salvo crashed out. 'Remember what  
else he said? Run the numbers. You are not a child, and that seventy teraton turbolaser is not a toy.'

The Venator shook as another salvo blasted downrange, and missed - two laser and two ion hits arriving almost simultaneously. 'Stop pissing about and do what works. I want sequence fire, you know, the way they're managing to hit us repeatedly?' There was another crash and a fireball from the bow as one of the LTL mounts had a fire window open - that coincided with an incoming ion bolt. Localised; what was in that area? Bow manoeuvre thrusters.

'We can make this work,' Kirritaine said, not convinced. 'Don't you want to show them we can do it? We're closing on them.'

Caliphant took a deep breath. He wanted to be a maniac himself, he really did. Would have liked to be able to play with turbolasers. Wanted to be able to make it up as he went along.  
Somebody had to stop all the other maniacs from getting themselves and each other killed, and that meant somebody, in this case him, had to get the short straw.

Kriff. I'm the Designated Driver for seven thousand idiots, he realised. The only thing to do is hammer them into shape - so that then it can be my turn.

'Kirritaine, the next words out of your mouth had kriffing well better be either "sequential fire, aye aye Sir" or "I resign my commission in favour of somebody competent." Your gun teams have had three days to practise together, Black Prince's had three thousand. You are not that good, so stick to the basics. Chief Officer out.'

There was five seconds of nothing happening; then a ragged, poorly coordinated fire began. In releasing the turrets from central control, they must have severed the link to central fire direction as well.

Nerves and high spirits - and none of it, none of it at all, was excusable. If that prat keeps this up, he might make me join the Empire, Caliphant thought. He meant that in the sense of starting to regard the regulations as something to be enforced, even cherished, as opposed to thinking of them as something to be endured and evaded at every available opportunity.  
That sort of attitude was all right for junior officers, from whom it was only to be expected, but not from the man in charge. Which was legally Vehrec, but practically, not so much acting capacity as in loco parentis, him.

Realistically, Tiger in the Night was trying to bite off much more than it could chew - but it was working for them, and they were winning, so far.

The lighter guns were nothing but a liability; their fire windows to let shot out could also let shot in. It would have to be a fluke, but it had already happened once, fortunately only with ion shot. One of them demonstrated its extreme liability by forgetting what colour of target identifier it was supposed to be shooting at. Light turbolaser fire reached out for the bomber squadrons.

Part of their planned troop complement had made it on board; good. 'SurfCom, LTL 24 has gone renegade. Breach it, shoot the gun crew. Engineering, cut power feed to LTL 24.' Bad. Hopefully that would deal with the problem expeditiously and discreetly enough - what was happening to him? Big, mealy-mouthed words.

'Get them to STKU, RTKN' was what he meant. And fast, before the bombers decided to take offence and have a go at it themselves. He almost missed the explosion.

On Tiger, one of the rebel fighters had, improbably, survived being hit by a ten-gun Interceptor. The Y-wing's hyperdrive module and astromech were shredded, so it couldn't escape that way. It had to limp back to the parent ship.

Maybe it really was true that fortune favoured the foolish; because Voracious' crew were certainly big enough fools to need it.

Vehrec, on the other hand, had ordered the fighters to leave the crippled rebels go, in the hope that something like this would happen. They had to lower the bay shields to let the cripple back on board. The older, more experienced bomber pilots were perfectly capable of taking advantage of opportunities like that. The rebel came in on final approach with a torpedo volley behind him.

The bay crew were not stupidly soft hearted; they flickered the shields back up. Better to lose one of their own, however painful it would be, than take fifty-plus torpedoes in the hangar bay. The rebel fighter hit the shield, and exploded; the torpedoes did the same.

The capital torpedoes launched from Voracious were more than capable of spotting the opportunity too. They hit the weakened shielding in short sequence, one after the other. The first two blasted it away; the last pair got through.

Two brilliant flares shone out of the nose-spanning hangar; then a third sympathetic detonation. Vehrec was surprised to see the thing still basically intact when the flare died; well, maybe that was an exaggeration.  
One side blown out of the bow, shielding down, electronics shocked and rad-blasted out, one set of main guns looked twisted off their mounts, the other set ceased fire.

'Bomb units, take the engines out, take the engines only. Voracious, we have a boarding action to fight. Ground units now.'

The Delta shuttle and its escort emerged back at Ghorn, in easy deceleration run on the lagrange point; Lennart spun the Delta end for end and began approach, but noticed from the sensor data - all the ships' powerplants were hot. All had shields up, most of the squadron's corvettes were deployed as an outer screen, and there were fighter patrols in the air.

'Captain? Thank fnord you're back. We have two major problems,' Brenn com'd and said, sounding distinctly worried.

'Is one of those the security leak that led to the rRasfenoni trying an intercept?' Lennart asked. If Brenn thought he couldn't cope, then it would be fairly bad.

'What are the others- let me see; the prisoner transport turned up full of cosmic hyper-eels from Chater's Dwarf Galaxy? Dynamic's crew finally mutinied? Ship's computer net developed sentience and went on strike for Droid Rights? How about… exec tried to seize command and declare me insane and unfit for duty? Vader coming to pay a visit.'

Brenn didn't entirely appreciate Lennart's efforts to cheer him up. 'No, Sir. Reports are incomplete, but it seems as if the sector fleet decided to steal our thunder - they launched a major attack on Ord Corban.'

'You sound remarkably grim. It's not going well?'

'We have no official word from them, no request or notification. We brought the squadron to general quarters and dispatched Blackwood and Provornyy for a direct report, but it sounds like a grade one clusterkriff,' Brenn related.

'Third Superiority Fleet were sent in - by the intercepts, it is a disaster. They've had least one destroyer crippled and probably lost. A second…may have defected.  
'We're out of the loop on this one; they're telling us nothing. We do have a couple of minor problems - you're half right about the exec for one, and I wish Dynamic's crew would mutiny so we could go over there and bang heads together properly. Do you know-'

'About the whip - round on the lower deck, to buy Captain Dordd his own private deluxe escape shuttle? I heard. You realise how big a breach of proper naval order and discipline that is?' Lennart asked him.

'I said that, but then I put myself down for a hundred credits,' Brenn admitted. 'I'm not sure whether it would be productive; if we could shame Dynamic into putting up some kind of performance, if they can still be reached by shame after their record, it might be worthwhile.'

'Or it might damage what authority he's been able to establish. I'm not sure how much worse this makes things, it means we're likely to face stiffer opposition when we do attack ourselves, I don't think it makes the situation any more time critical than it already is.  
'Hold the shuttle for now, and start hoping you or I don't have any use for it.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Brenn acknowledged.

'What's the second problem?' Lennart asked.

'Oh, far far worse,' Brenn said, lighter in tone. He no more than half meant it.

'What can be worse than the sector fleet taking that kind of pounding?' Lennart questioned him.

'Having to explain it to the press. We've got an infestation of journalists incoming.'

'Stall them, lie to them, arrest them if you have to - no, wait. Maybe we can use them.'

Blackwood, and the Fulgur escorting her, approached the battle zone slowly, scanners at full stretch. Sit nearby, watch the light cone roll over them. That had been the plan, anyway.

It collapsed when they detected the bow shock of a large warship heading their way. Exit hyperspace, scan, predict the emergence point; whatever it was, it was on a straight line to Ghorn. Both of them signalled the information back, were ordered to proceed on to the battle site - with extreme caution.

On Black Prince's bridge, Lennart was back in something resembling uniform and going through the com intercepts when the contact report from Blackwood came in.

They were already at general quarters, nothing more to do there, just line up on the probable point of emergence. As the target entered their own sensor range, it seemed to be an Imperator-class, probably one of the older generation; but there was one of the intercepts about an urgent order from one ship to the other, to cease fire on a friendly unit.

That was why Brenn had been thinking mutiny. The tone of the intercept was about right for it. Somehow, thinking about mutiny led naturally to the Dynamic - a ship assignment Lennart wouldn't have wished on an enemy. Dordd had been happy to relinquish the squadron to him, and Lennart felt guilty about that; he should be doing more to back his former exec up.

So was this a fleeing loyalist, or an attacking mutineer? Voracious had reported herself engaged - that still left three destroyers available to be used against one. They were moving into position around the predicted drop point.

Slightly closer, and there were traces of smaller craft in company. Maybe one medium frigate, one light frigate, three large and four small corvettes. About right for a new-pattern Battle Squadron that had taken fifty percent losses among the escort craft.

Battle squadron. Now there was a grotesquely overblown title for a single fleet destroyer and supporting light forces. Tarkin's political side had struck again, there, inflation of title for intimidation purposes. Lennart had flown escort duty on true capital ships back in the Clone Wars, and with all of the navy list to chose from, a siege squadron headed by a Mandator would be a remarkably welcome sight about now.

There was one intercept that mentioned "A rebel cruiser. No, a real one." Did that mean Home-class? As rare as generous Hutts, the Alliance hadn't even tried to build more than four. Imperial strikes had broken one up on the stocks, taken a deepdock with the skeleton of another. Enormously unlikely.

What else did the Rebels have in that weight class? The Techno Union could still put big ships together; it was Quarren who had the responsibility for the Recusant. None known, though. Not at present. Clone Wars relic? Possibly even a battle grade Lucrehulk? That or a renegade Imperial type, most likely. The answers would be on board that ship approaching.

Their target reached emergence, broke through. Gleaming white, but marked, scarred in parts. She was flying the pennant - the transponder reply codes, anyway - of a flagship, but looking at her superstructure that was now very unlikely. Shields down, some of the generators were going to need work; one of the sensor domes was split open, there was a crater in the forward hull by the secondary bay, burn marks from light turbolaser fire like freckles all over the upper hull, and a still-glowing molten gash across the face of the bridge tower.

The symbol blazoned on each side of the bridge tower identified her as the Fist.

'Checks out, captain. Flagship of the Third Superiority Fleet, Vice-Admiral Ulbin Zavix commanding.'

'Shouldn't that be past tense?' Lennart said, waving at the damage to the tower. 'Hail her.'

The face that came up was a woman; sharp-faced, orange-red haired, long nose with wide nostrils. Probably not Ulbin, then, apart from the rank insignia - captain's squares, glittering code cylinders that indicated a flag captain.

'Captain Tevar, HIMS Fist. You would be Captain Lennart?' she said; Core worlder accent. She was looking brittle, Lennart thought - not at all surprising after what had in all probability happened to her and her ship.

'Captain of the Line Jorian Lennart, HIMS Black Prince, Objective Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod. Is Admiral Zavix alive?'

'No,' she said, with all due outward, formal solemnity, but from the way her face twisted at the mention of his name she was glad to see the back of him. From the visible background, she was in the fire direction centre. It was certainly possible to do so, but why had she chosen to con her ship from there?

Lennart's imagination clicked. 'Was the Admiral a Falleen, possibly a trusted relative of your Moff?' That was why he had thought 'wide nostrils'- a strange idea on the face of it, but with pheromone-filtering nose plugs, that added up.

He was also putting Captain Tevar- his com/scan team were already digging in the sector databanks for her personnel file - on the spot, by speculating on the possibility that her former boss had been a nepotistically appointed poser who couldn't find his arse with both hands.

Then again, most people would have difficulty finding the admiral's arse now that it had been vapourised.

He watched her thinking, trying to weigh his reputation and decide how he would react to the various answers available to her. She settled on, 'At this precise point, I don't think it matters. There has been a disaster; we were assigned to attack a world of apparently minor importance - it was a rebel major base.'

'I know,' Lennart said. 'Ord Corban, the target we were here to hit.' He decided not to spell it out any further. 'How much else is left of Third Superiority Fleet?'

She looked bleak at that, seeing in her mind's eye again just how much had been lost.

'Com/scan,' Lennart asked, 'Any word from Blackwood and Provornyy?'

'I don't know.' Tevar said, and just then her personnel file popped up; Trysandrena Illyria Tevar, family of the minor nobility, joined the Starfleet five months before the end of the Clone Wars, promoted Captain 226-32. Four years' seniority, more or less. Had her current ship for two. Several reprimands for "inappropriate relationships with the crew"; that was the sort of comment that could dog a female officer's career.

Lennart knew exactly what it was supposed to imply but looking at her bearing, and the list of recommendations, reprimands and commendations she had issued, he doubted it. Far more likely that she had been playing mother, taking a relatively close and supporting interest in her crew's personal as well as professional lives. Nothing wrong with that; as Lennart had tried to beat into the heads of four years' worth of trainee officers, the problems of the people you command are the problems of command.

Of course, her enemies and rivals had written it up in the most insulting way they could manage - and she had come out at the end of it with a destroyer of her own anyway.

'Admiral Zavix-' she was arguing how to phrase it; just before he could give her permission to speak freely, she did so anyway. 'If he wasn't dead I would beat him to death with his own scent glands; he botched the attack so badly we had no chance. He was a fool, and he took a great many good ships and good men with him,' she said, with a mixture of anger and relief at having vented her feelings. Possibly also guilt. As the flag captain, if it was anybody's job to stop him it had been hers.

She suspected that was what he was thinking; Lennart intended to suspend judgement until all the facts were in, but she forestalled him by saying, 'I know the rules. For success, no questions asked, for failure, no excuse accepted.'

'Are you asking to have a court of inquiry convened on you?' Lennart said, understanding but considering it inappropriate.

'First things first; is it necessarily over? Would there be any useful military purpose served by an immediate follow-up attack?' he asked.

'We thought it was a live exercise. We had no reason to expect them to be there at all,' she said, still half stunned by the incident - no explanation for failure accepted, she was right about that, but she wanted to find one, wanted to answer the question of what went wrong.

'No, there would be none of Fourth Superiority Fleet left.'

'Skipper?' Rythanor. 'Sensor feed from Blackwood. No Imperial IFF showing, a lot of wreckage in low orbit, one Imperator, two large contacts, one highly energetic. Planetary shields are up, first-line military grade. Count thirty plus smaller ships.'

'So the gloves, and some of the masks, are off. Any ID on the large contacts?'

'One of them is an old Imperial type. A Shockwave,' Tevar said. 'That was the ship that tore the bridge module apart.'

'Makes sense,' Rythanor agreed. 'That would make the other prime target a Lucrehulk. Combat carrier, if not full battle refit.'

'Ah.' Lennart said. 'I think Third Superiority sprung the ambush that the Alliance were intending for us.' He thought about it for a further second. 'Com/scan, line commander's conference, on board, now. You too, Captain Tevar. We have a lot of fast thinking to do.'


	33. Chapter 33

Raesene was playing chase with the rRasfenoni frigate and not enjoying it. The slippery little thing was jumping ahead of him, behind him...it had an extraordinary amount of energy to spare.

There had already been two near misses: one as it had emerged from hyperspace behind him, dropped off a sequence of ram-drones, and hypered back out, one as they had returned the favour with a remote flown TIE right in its predicted path - both times, a last second, full power evasive move had been barely enough.

Third time would be the charm.

Vehrec was hovering, close off the port side of the slowly tumbling, drifting Liberator-class. What were they missing, he thought. Well, Voracious had missed. Lots. They were evidently not particularly good shots, or gunnery tacticians - overambitious, trying to run before they could walk. Outgunning the smaller ship six to one and beating her four to one in depth of shield, they should have won eventually anyway. It wasn't really good enough.

The minelayer - hold on a moment. It was still out there, still moving at better than 0.8c, still with something, maybe enough to be dangerous, in its payload bays.

Voracious and Tiger were moving slowly, drifting predictably. The rRasfenoni ship had already made one attack run, on Obdurate, and missed by metres.

The old, fragile Venator was a far more obvious and rewarding target.

'Voracious, this is Vehrec. Recommend you take precautions against hyper-drop missile attack.'

Precautions? What precautions? As if he expects me to know what that means, Caliphant thought. How well does pre-emptive dodging, against an attack that hasn't been aimed yet, work?

Ah. Aiming. There's the wrinkle. The layer frigate has to time its emergences far enough off the target to get a manoeuvre cone big enough to compensate for nav error, and also with enough time in hand to do a sensor sweep and decide how to act. They made one attempt to achieve surprise by short-circuiting that process; it nearly got them killed. So this time they'll likely do it properly.

So, project their base course, and manoeuvre so that a straight line reciprocal leads through Tiger in the Night. Use the rebel frigate as a shield to intercept any carelessly dropped kinetic kill weapons.

Oh, and lob a couple of spreads of torpedoes in semi-dormant mode out beyond her, just for a laugh.

He needed to manoeuvre closer anyway; Voracious had picked up her full complement of ground troops, and a mixed salad they were, but she had nothing like her full complement, Clone War or Civil War load, of transports and dropships.

A fully laden Liberator carried three full regiments. Tiger in the Night had not been at full strength to begin with, and after having two heavy torpedoes detonate in the small craft bay adjacent to the troop decks, it was possible Voracious' Composite Battlegroup of Detachments outnumbered them four to one. That included Stormtroopers, Naval Infantry, Imperial Army - two regular and three reservist battalions - two battalions of CompForce who had caught which way the wind was blowing and were protesting their loyalty every five seconds, and a gaggle of Sector Defence Volunteers - quasi-militia with a serious xenophobia problem.

Normally, he would have led with the Stormtroopers; bearing in mind the casualties usually incurred by the first in, Caliphant had sent the local volunteers.

He needed to manoeuvre closer anyway, to shorten the turnaround cycle for the shuttles he did have. May as well use the manoeuvre to take shelter at the same time.

Who was next most expendable, if that thing did take a hit? Probably the naval infantry.

The object of the exercise was not to take the ship; it was to extract information: live prisoners and unfried computers. They didn't need to have it to keep. The frigate was a constructive total loss, probably.

Interestingly, the first reports indicated that there were relatively few rRasfenoni on board, and that it was probably not a regular forces rebel ship either: wide variety of kit, several races - rRasfenoni hirelings.

'Nav,' Caliphant said, 'plot us a short-jump course; straight ahead will do, just get the base points so we know what we've done and can map from, call it a light minute out. Something we can go with PDQ as an escape route if we do get jumped.'

'Aye aye, Sir.' Voracious' nav acknowledged.

'Chief Officer?' one of the pit crew. 'Ground force contact - they say that the crew are surrendering, and requesting to be taken off at once. Something about bombs.'

Stang, Caliphant thought. Bombs? What would- ah. It's not rRasfenoni regular service, competent enough but basically a hotchpotch of rebel advisors and freelancers, half of them ex-pirate. If I was the five-armed guys' chief tactician, I wouldn't have trusted them as far as I could spit them. I'd have wanted the ship back, hoped it wouldn't be necessary, but I would have fitted that thing with a self destruct mechanism just in case.

Time and distance, what was going to happen next - 'Tell our grunts to get out, if they can. Take the locals with them, use life pods, use shuttles that are there, use their own landers. I think that ship's going to blow.'

'Hyperspace emergence,' Com/scan reported. 'It's the minelayer.'

'Let's see how well this works,' Caliphant said. 'I don't think they'll give the militia much time-'

Tiger in the Night started to come apart from her reactor outwards, the ugly horned slab cracking and bending, the separated parts hovering in place for a millisecond before the overloaded powerplant's blast melted them.

Voracious was still distant enough for her shields to take it. Cracking and flaring, though, diminished and reduced. So much for cover. 'Weapons, bring the torpedoes to full active,' Caliphant ordered as the first of the penetrators began to cascade loose from the minelayer's bays. 'Nav, get us out of here.'

Eight torpedoes in the air. The minelayer frigate detected them, started spraying fire at them. It lost its target when Voracious went to lightspeed with fourteen seconds to spare.

Three of the torpedoes got close enough to detonate.

Enough of the frigate survived to make its own jump, but the retrieval operation was blown beyond recovery - and if they were exceptionally lucky, especially after nearly being self destructed, there might be some of the survivors from the Liberator willing to talk.

Orders had come through, anyway; tidy up there, take whatever they had found, and return to Ghorn for a command conference.

An honour guard of Stormtroopers escorted Captain Tevar from the landing platform in the secondary bay to the turbolift. She kept waiting for them to arrest her and was surprised when it failed to happen.

One thing in the large personnel lift caught her attention: an electric noticeboard that seemed to be cycling through the local newspaper. Some ships had such things, some did not; it depended on the newness of the commanding officer. Men and women formed wholly by the New Order tended not to permit such things; believed, or held to the party line and then were forced to live up to their statements, that such a sense of community was subversive of real discipline. The Fist's scansheet was basically a digest of fleet and galactic news, articles copied from official publications.

By the inexorable laws of extremely bad punnage, this ship's was headed "Black Prints." Someone deserved to swing for that. There were subheadings; Home News, seeming to mean the ship's crew's home planets; most of them seemed to be from the mid-rim, as many outer rim as core worlders. Local News, where they were and what they were up to at the moment. A heavily edited version, she suspected. Sports and Entertainment, Rumour and Speculation - apparently the letters pages - and Births, Marriages and Deaths. Peculiar was not the word.

She started leafing through the sports section, looking for a handle on the crew's morale and state of mind.

They had a four-division websphere league, which was being held up at the bottom end by Financial Wizards (paymaster's office); the league leaders were Proton Turpitude (fighter ordnance handlers), closely followed by Possibly Are (com/scan) and You Think We Do This For Fun (first walker batallion). That was a surprise. The stormtroopers joined in?

Smashball, on the other hand - the teams included Tentacle Sex Monsters (medical-nonhuman), Duct Divers (deck division- maintenance), Collateral Damage (gunnery), The De-Breathers (life support) - but it was basically the black gang's game, with the Sheeple Crushers (regulatory) being the only non-Engineering team in a top ten that included Unlimited Power (reactor), Bodgit and Scarper (damage control), Mad 'Mechs (structure), Now Then, Now Then (stasis tech), and The Bigger Hammer (engineering-command).

There was a pod racing (simulated) league in which two of the teams, Speed of Heat (fighter pilots) and Zig-Zag Wanderers (scout bikers), had been suspended for "insufficient simulation". There was a holochess ranking list and a sabacc leaderboard, and also something called Kalvanball that she had never heard of. She looked at the league tables: the scores, in points, runs, goals, tries and limbs, were all in irrational numbers. Only 'Rules Arguments Won' was in plain arithmetic, and Long Drawn Out And Excruciatingly Painful (legal office) were in second place there behind Every Move You Make (com/scan).

It all spoke of high morale, but a deeply warped sense of humour. Rumour and Speculation were even worse. There was an item from Coruscant that she was sure was a joke. One skyscraper tower had apparently decided that it was a sentient being in its own right, the local network absorbing old datasystems and apparently reaching critical mass. Not wildly unlikely; what gave it away was the editorial comment that it hoped the building hadn't been listening to too much propaganda, because if it tried to join the Starfleet they would have hell's own time fitting it through the corridors.

The executive officer was apparently the winner of a "sponsored hiding contest" - with an attached opinion piece purporting to be from a protocol droid assigned to him; apparently the exec was a near human with metallic-appearing skin, which was the only way comments like 'oh my aching joints, lube me' and 'ah, so strict' could be made sense of. It was clear that he was spectacularly unpopular, and widely viewed as ineffectual; would they have mocked him like that, otherwise? Possibly; but would they have felt they needed to?

There was a personal ad, which was almost certainly a sick joke in its own right; ZB to GM, why do you never come to me any more? How I long for the squeeze of your hairy arms, the rough tickle of your beard on my breasts. I yearn for you, to explore your strength and immolate myself on your power.

Good grief, Tevar thought. It's a big galaxy, true, but is it big enough to contain anyone still capable to taking turgid purple garbage like that at face value? She doubted it.

She was almost relieved when she finally reached the conference room and found a dozen officers there waiting for her.

Captain of the Line Lennart was at the head of the table in a state of uniform that would have given a drill sargeant nightmares; his own senior officers, including a man the equal in mass of any two others who was having difficulty staying awake and another with a face full of chemical scars, were next to him at the head of the table. Next to them, three officers with the highlight under the rank flash that marked them as formation commanders: one still in a flight suit, one woman, one alternating between putting on a brave face and wanting to hide. Then there were the individual ship commanders, one who seemed to have brought a pair of police with him. They were looking very nervous. Around the walls of the chamber, a squad of exotic-variant stormtroopers.

'We will begin,' Lennart said, standing and leaning on the table, 'with the events of today.'

'Begin what?' the huge, hairy engineer asked, slumping slightly.

'It's exposition time, Gethrim,' Lennart said. 'Who else apart from you and me knows what's going on?'

Mirannon looked up, meaning the imperial suite. 'I've been too busy to be fully in the loop, but I do know we're still missing one piece.'

'Motive? Good point. We'll fill in the rest of the puzzle and come back to that. Captain Tevar, would you now talk us through the events of this morning?'

It was so weirdly phrased that it took her a second to realised she was being asked to explain herself.

She plugged the log disc into the table's display unit. The lights went down. 'Third Superiority Fleet was a paper formation until two days ago,' she admitted. 'My ship was on a flag-waving tour of the ninetieth circuit - trading worlds along the local spine - when we were reassigned. I had never met Admiral Zavix before.'

The table of organisation for Third Superiority Fleet came up. A full sector group would have had four superiority fleets, built around six line destroyers each and possibly a heavy destroyer leadship; the fleet had one superiority systems force, the three destroyers, and an awful lot of paper attachments.

Somebody somewhere was drawing pay and allowances for a high count of nonexistent personnel.

'My ship was chosen as the flag because of our readiness rate,' Tevar explained. 'I knew the others only by reputation - there were private contacts, but no command conference. Proclamations only.'

'Did you know Admiral Zavix by reputation - had you, in fact, ever even heard of him before?'

'No,' Tevar said. 'His file showed that he had been an administrative officer, some experience in escort command, but mainly logistics. Very young for his rank. And Falleen.'

'Up and coming young nobleman - speaking of which, your family were related to the pre-Clone War sector governors, were they not?'

'What does that have to do with anything?' Tevar asked, irritated.

'Quite a lot. He was supposed to seduce you because of your family connections,' she flushed, stood up, and looked about to swing for him; the stormtroopers took a step closer to her.  
Lennart carried on, 'Right then, because things were starting to come apart for them, they needed the help and support of the sector's old nobility. You may have achieved your position on merit, but for this job it was your kin that mattered. Care to offer an alternative explanation of why you were conning your ship from fire direction, with filter plugs in your nose?'

She sat down again.

'The reason this matters,' Lennart explained, 'is because the situation is complicated enough that we need to understand it all, in order to decide who to shoot and in what order. How did you get a Falleen moff in the first place? How did they get, and why did they choose to use, the political clout to force your kith and kin out of the loop?  
'The target system' - Ord Corban came up on the display - 'was a fleet base during the Clone Wars, that was deleted and expunged from the records for reasons which it would be hazardous to know, and which I will discuss if there is absolutely no alternative,' Lennart said; Mirannon nodded, looking solemn.

'It was mothballed more or less intact,' Lennart said, 'and someone, one of those people who are always responsible because you can only be given the opportunity for a crime this big if you are a trusted member of the inner circle, put their credit balance first.  
'Someone, in COMPNOR or the Ubiqtorate, sold out the back door access.  
'Legal niceties be damned. It's more or less common knowledge that Prince Xizor is one of the most corrupt beings in the galaxy and the public face, if not the actual head, of Black Sun. Think about it. A full fleet yard, capable of constructing craft up to destroyer class and repairing and maintaining cruisers at least, under a security blanket that made it untouchable by Imperial forces. I can prove very little, I have to admit, but it hangs together too well to be very far from the truth. What political assets they cashed in to do this we may or may not ever be able to reconstruct.  
'The upshot is that Black Sun, or the Falleen race as a whole, managed to get one of their own put in here and in charge of the sector specifically in order to exploit Ord Corban. The normal perquisites and priviledges of rank were simply icing on the cake.'

'You know,' he looked around the locals, 'how very little territory patrol and escort command actually covers; how much of the sector is barely policed, and how under-reported piracy and space crime are. Not coincidence, not accident. Some of you are further in this than you realise; Group Captain, how many of the pilots you trained do you think found their way into the Imperial Starfleet, and how many into Black Sun and other pirate fleets?' he asked Vehrec.

'What a load of utter nerfshit…' Vehrec's voice trailed off, remembering some of his cadets.

'The real requirements were the highest possible professional standard, and low enough political reliability that the grads could be seduced away. Who better than you for that?' Lennart said, smiling precisely because it wasn't a joke.

'That doesn't mean it happened, just because it's plausibl,.' Vehrec said, indignant.

'The numbers say it did. Your and other flight academies passed out two hundred and fifty percent over and above the requirement for the sector; the excess are supposed to have been transferred to other sectors - as Regional units, we have the access to prove that only another one in seven actually did. As many as four in seven of your trainees went to private contractors, and a high proportion of them would not be legitimate. I'm sorry, but all the evidence is that you were used.'

'Then-' Vehrec was still trying to assimilate it all in his head- 'Why me? Why pick me for this outfit?'

'I reasoned,' Lennart decided to say, 'that you would be sufficiently annoyed to want your chance at revenge. That and, truth be told, I don't want to see someone who went through the same crap as I did back in the Clone Wars to get himself shot without at least the chance to clear his name.'

'A courtesy from one old retread to another?' Vehrec said, not best pleased at having to be helped and accepting it with poor grace.

'You could put it like that,' Lennart said, glossing over the details.  
'So,' he continued, 'the criminals buy their way into the Imperial hierarchy in the sector, and set out to make that investment show a profit. The sector has other problems: two alien races already here, one with some extremely unpleasant habits, as Commander Falldess and her home planet know all too well. What happened between the rRasfenoni and the Falleen I do not know, nor do we have enough to go on at this stage, but it's complicated enough for a quintuple cross.  
'Initially, the rRasfenoni must have gone along with the scam, agreed not to rock the boat in return for a cut of the actual proceeds, but it must have dawned on them that they could be very easily hung out to dry in such a position, so they threw in their lot with the Rebellion. The Alliance are too short of well-armed friends to vet those they do have sufficiently closely; who in their right mind would trust the Bothans, for instance? The rRasfenoni accepted the help, and proceeded to implicate the Alliance in their crimes. Something I took considerable pleasure in pointing out to an Alliance agent I happened to look up, in case anyone was wondering where I disappeared to there. I threatened them with full disclosure.  
'The rebels have no positive choice - stand by the rRasfenoni and proclaim themselves guilty of the crimes they accuse the Empire of, disown them very publicly, which for my purposes suits well enough because that only leaves the sector government to blame, or pass judgement on them themselves- two sets of our erstwhile enemies shooting at each other would be a pleasant sight indeed.'

'What the rebels don't kill of them, we finish off later?' Falldess asked, tone daring him to say no.

'I don't want to have to, the vast majority of the civilian population, even of the rank and file, can't be implicated in this, but I doubt anything less would prevent them from doing it again. An eye for an eye, a world for a world,' Lennart confirmed.

'Anyway, through either arm of this deal, the Alliance bought their way into access to Ord Corban, which was a major miscalculation on Black Sun's part.  
'The Rebel Alliance has a few things going for it: it has a ready supply of romantic idiots, more than it can gather, train and transport, and there are enough small-scale, quasi-legitimate means of securing funding from the grass roots that men and money are not the Alliance's primary problems. What they are desperately short of is heavy metal and its essential prerequisite, yard space. Ord Corban must have been a gift from Destiny herself to them, and the Falleen underestimated how far they would be prepared to go to gain access to and hold on to the planet.

You pair,' he said to the two ISB agents standing behind Raesene, 'anything you'd like to add?'

The younger of the two agents looked about to break out in defiance - that the elder thought would be extremely ill judged. How to play this, vel Salif was thinking. The innocent pawn, just a policeman, honest, not my fault my boss was corrupt?

Truth be told, Lennart's case hung together terrifyingly well. A certain amount of profiteering was expected, even acceptable. Self-administered performance related pay was one of the acknowledged rights of being a moff. This went well beyond anything that could conceivably be called legitimate.  
Might they not be better off trying the other approach? Too valuable to kill outright?

'How would you like to be able to prove that? Enough of it, at least, to stand up before the Council?' vel Salif said, trying to look approximately trustworthy.

'I am impressed by how instantly you managed to believe that,' Lennart said, dryly.

'We were told to gather evidence against you, by officers who we had no proof were not legitimate authority. Your whole plan, your selection of these people, is based on the idea that most of the mid to low ranks of the sector group are legitimate servants of the Empire. Is it not obvious?'

'Not really, no,' Lennart said. 'Too glib. As soon as a more proper authority reveals itself, you swing lodestone-like to point on it? Remember; at the very least, you were abusing your authority to score points in an internal faction fight, by attempting to compromise a Starfleet officer - me. Professional malfeasance; and unfortunately for you, I don't have to wait to take that to trial.'

The younger agent, Dorind Salif, stood up and went for his gun. It was a lunatic, if I'm going down I'm taking you with me, sort of move; his uncle, knowing he was under the guns of a dozen stormtroopers, decided to save his life and his nephew's - by punching him in the groin. A simple backhander from the sitting position.

The young man collapsed, screaming; it was made worse by four stun bolts slamming into him before he hit the ground.

'Well,' Lennart said, 'at least that didn't sound rehearsed. Take them away,' he told Aleph-One, 'let Eleven-Indigo have them. One stipulation; he's to remain at least basically sane when they're done.' Lennart tried to avoid looking vel Salif in the eye as fire team Gimel dragged the pair of ISB agents out; Eleven-Indigo were the deep probe team. They were political police; they deserved no better. That was what he was telling himself, anyway.

'SFA(I) Rontaine scooped up some of the wounded from Free Gravity For All for immediate treatment, did she not? Rebels and some of the crew.' Lennart put to Vehrec.

'Yes, we got Space Major Overgaard, the one the rebels were using as their mouthpiece. Senior survivor, actually - Rontaine says that the rebs left him in bad enough condition, the only security job he's likely to get now is if Darth Vader needs a body double.'

'Don't,' Mirannon yawned half way through, 'give me ideas.'

'Don't make me have to tell you what to do with them,' Lennart said to his chief engineer. 'In any case, he is someone else who should have useful local knowledge. Which brings us back to this morning. Captain Tevar?'

'Give me a moment. This is a lot to take in.' Tevar said, trying to parse her thoughts.

Most of the rest of the locals were similarly boggled. He had just told them they had been living a lie, and a remarkably monstrous one at that. In consideration of that he had the holotable start cycling through the evidence. Patrol route map, actuarial data, previous clashes, rRasfenoni attacks and ecological disasters that could have been attacks, police arrest rates on the key worlds of the sector, promotions and transfers of government officials.

'One question,' Elstrand raised his head and asked. 'When did you know all this?'

'I first suspected something was very wrong when I noticed a naval depot system marked on the sector map as a place of no importance. That was not long after the capture of Grey Princess and the destruction of Syurdraev. Since then I've been figuring it out a strand at a time, and looking for the loose threads that I could use to unravel this without causing a complete political crisis and security disaster in the process,' Lennart stated.

'We're settling for a partial crisis, then?' Mirannon yawned. 'Comarre Meridian can be ready to move in six hours plus the time it takes to ship twelve million tons of duracrete, but the only way Tarazed Meridian is going to be battle ready in less than two days is if we tow her on an extension cord.'

'That's a lot less than your original estimate,' Lennart said, wondering.

'That would be the "Brutal but correct" estimate? This is missing trials, calibration, integration - six hours and two days, if I stop even pretending to try to do a proper job that won't blow up or fall off half way through the fight.'

'So whether the tactical situation gives us that time is the important question, isn't it? Captain Tevar?'

The tactical display changed to the Corban system, Ord Corban being the second planet out on the inner, hot edge of the life zone. There was a smaller mining world, close enough to the sun that the surface temperature must have done half the work of smelting for them; it too had shielding and defensive emplacements. Outwards, empty orbit, cold rock, small gas giant, asteroids, large giant with a glitteringly bright ring system - most of them with sensor watch platforms if not gun turrets.

'If Vice-Admiral Zavix knew that the system was supposed to be heavily defended, he only hinted at it to us,' Tevar stated. 'We were given orders to aim for an emergence point here.' She pointed it out on the system map. Frighteningly close to the planet. Knife-fighting range, in fact.

'Interestingly lunatic,' Lennart decided. 'There are very few circumstances that would justify a move like that - hit and run raid, maybe. That or so heavily outclassed that what the enemy do to each other from the crossfire as you appear in the middle of them is more effective than anything you can manage yourself; neither of those ideas should apply with three destroyers.'

'He wanted to appear suddenly, right in their faces, for intimidation value,' Tevar said.

Lennart stopped himself from heckling, this time. Let her tell this in her own way.

'We were briefed to conduct a combat drop; flyby attack then decelerate and return to high orbit and release the drop craft. All three fleet destroyers were in stepped line astern, the Fist trailing low, Riever high and leading, Tomor centre. We were told that it was a derelict facility; none of us expected to come out under the guns of a fortress world.'

'An early open period depot would have been designed around the expectation of attack by a battle division of four, possibly six Lucrehulks. With three Imperator class…'

What Captain Tevar wanted to hear, not that she would admit it or that he would insult her by saying it in so many words, would be that it wasn't their fault. It would be good for the morale of her crew - and the survivors of the fleet escorts - to hear that they had been given a basically impossible job, and done well to come out of it. Give them some of their pride back, and someone useful to blame. It still wasn't yet certain that it was true, though.

That, and he didn't want to tell the Pursuit Squadron that they were doomed.

'It's do-able in principle,' Lennart continued, 'but it needs the technique of the rapier. Long range, highest possible relative motion. Jumping straight into the fire - you did well in getting anything out. Go on.'

'It took us several moments to realise what we were up against,' Tevar said. 'We were expecting a stolen garrison base, maybe a grounded starship. Superheavy turbolasers - Tomor took three hits in the belly in the opening salvo, shattered her bow, started fires and secondary explosions in the small craft bay.  
'The Admiral didn't seem to understand; maybe he was just projecting calm, but, he ordered the drop continued. Send the small craft and escorts down after them. Tomor was wallowing; she was taking ion fire as well; I rolled the Fist to present our guns, and managed to pick up Tomor on our tractor beams to help tow her out. Reiver scrambled her fighters and dropships, but the air was alive with LTL and point defence laser fire.'

'That fits,' Lennart said. 'The point defence grid needed to keep off a swarm of droid fighters was always impressive. It wouldn't have been healthy for the escort corvettes.'

'It - I didn't have time to think about how dangerous it would be for them. I ordered the Fist's escort lines in to strafe the defence turrets; the Admiral countermanded that and ordered us all to break for high orbit. I didn't want to fight it out under their guns any more than he did, but I ended up arguing that if we simply turned our backs on them we would be torn apart.'

The action was playing itself out as she spoke, holodisplay following her words.

'Scissors, paper, stone,' Lennart said. 'The big ship guns go after the anti-corvette defences, the corvettes shoot out the point defence, that opens the way for the bombers to take down the heavy defence lasers. That is, at least, the theory.'

By the display at least, the theory wasn't working. Perhaps they could have done better - but it was basically every ship for herself. There was a reason 'run for it' was not in the official order book.

The Fist was zig-zagging as well as she could, trying to tow a cripple, but the snowstorm of laser fire around her made it almost impossible to launch tugs, or for the Tomor to launch life pods.

'We took shield hits, Tomor took another superheavy laser to the engines, I don't think she would have been repairable even if - I remember being baffled by the fact that we weren't dead. Riever's shields were down and the ion cannon were angling for her, Tomor had some drift velocity outwards, still had power in her gun capacitors.  
'We were taking hits ourselves; four-hundreds I think, and the shields were crumbling, Reiver had accelerated straight ahead and then turned to bear, so we were separated; the Admiral ordered her back into line to cover him, and - Reiver's captain, Daszeti, tried to surrender.  
'Fighting broke out on board, what of her stormtrooper legion hadn't been deployed tried to retake the bridge and continue the action. Admiral Zavix ordered ourselves and the escort group to fire on her in preference. He ordered my arrest when I refused to do so,' Tevar admitted.

'Your rationale?' Lennart said, calmly.

'They weren't shooting at us, the planet was,' She said. 'I didn't have time to think of any more sophisticated reason there and then.'

Carry on,' Lennart instructed.

'That was when the other jaw of the trap closed,' Tevar said, and there were a series of flashes as ships exited hyperspace. Two large ships, Shockwave and Lucrehulk, emerged: the Shockwave in close proximity to the Fist and Tomor, the Lucrehulk - which identified as the One and Indivisible - in proximity to Reiver; she began to discharge landers and assault boats. The Shockwave identified as Admonisher; remarkably Imperial-sounding.

Mirannon glanced at Lennart, who nodded; that had been the former flagship of the 118th Republic Fleet. He was too tired to conceal the gesture as well as he thought he had.

Shockwave-class were fearsome beasts; not overwhelmingly efficient, sprawling, flabby ships in some requests, but they were genuine heavy destroyers, barely this side of light cruiser. They mounted twelve eight-cell gun banks for the same seventy-teraton turbolasers mounted on the Venator.

Admonisher rolled to bring her guns to bear, the Fist got off the first shots, but they sparked off the larger ship's shielding. The return fire carved a crater in the Imperator's bow, blasting out the power lines to the tractor beam cluster towing Tomor; the second salvo crashed into the fore superstructure, and ate a glowing hole in it.

'Admiral Zavix died in that salvo; we had lost contact with Tomor, Reiver was being boarded - I could have kept fighting. I could have tried to take one of them.'

Lennart decided she actually meant it. Guilt, to some degree, disappointment, but what more was there to do? Did she actually deserve to be punished for her actions? Did Falldess, for failing to get out of the way of a swarm of planet killers? Did Raesene, for inviting along a pair of snooping security men? Did Barth-Elstrand, for misreading the actions of a rebel ship and putting his frigate in line for a concrete bow cap?

Did he, for misreading the situation badly enough to think it was in no-one's interest to force the issue, and therefore he had time? What simplicity it was to punish failure, to be able to fall from a great height on the unfortunate. Lennart wished he could do things that straightforwardly.

Past a certain point, being able to dispose of incompetent junior officers was a privilege of rank; at Rear-Admiral or better, say, you had enough people under you that you could afford to hire and fire. As a junior officer, make do and mend was the order of the day. It was necessary to make the best of the personnel available to you.

I could have stayed on the appointments directorate, Lennart thought, but it would have driven me round the bend before long. Never mind career prospects. So doing essentially the same now - I could make a case against any or all of them, probably manage to have them broken, if not actually shot. How much fun would I have in front of a court of inquiry, defending my own actions with respect to the exec, if nothing else?

We have more officers hungry for command than we have ships, so anybody who screws up usually doesn't get a second chance. They get shouldered aside by the men behind them. Which procedure litters the galaxy with failed and burnt-out officers with nothing better to go and do than fight for our enemies, and no better aim in life than to give us grief.

Then again, a real failure does deserve it, and we have more than enough spare disintegration booths. All of us have got people killed. Except, actually, Raesene, who is feeling guiltiest of the lot.

What to do? Who deserves to have the hard hand of the system descend on them - who was guilty of lack of forethought, lack of intelligence, who can no longer be trusted with the lives of Imperial spacemen?  
Falldess? If that little twitch was anything to go by, she would never admit to her crew, and very seldom to herself, how much losing them hurt. She would be unlikely to make the same mistakes again.  
Vehrec and Caliphant - running that madhouse of a ship? Not yet. Vehrec had some tactical sense, when he let his adrenalin glands give his brain a chance.  
Barth-Elstrand? He was too busy punishing himself. If he didn't stop, it might be necessary to replace him, and there was little time left to put him to the proof.

As for Captain Tevar - 'Tried is the operative word. Whichever you turned your back on, the other would have pounded your ship to pieces - if the planetary defence batteries didn't get to it first. Mistakes were made; suboptimal decisions were taken, suboptimal actions were carried out; yours was not the prime responsibility. Technically you might even be guilty of allowing a traitor to escape, aiding and abetting, disobeying an order; we might have to clone you to carry out the full sentence. So what? It would have made no difference.  
'Your ship would have been destroyed before you managed to lay enough fire on Reiver to deny her to the enemy. Following through on the Admiral's instructions would have cost the Empire three star destroyers, not two.  
'The way we'll write it up, the decision of the court is that the charges against you are technicalities without foundation, based on a difference in tactical understanding of the situation, and should be dropped.' She tried not to look too relieved.

'Which leaves the question of how do we proceed from here.' Lennart continued. 'I misread the situation myself, by assuming everyone involved was a rational actor,' he admitted. 'It was not in our interest to charge in before repairs and group integration were complete; it was not in the Rebels' interest to pick another stand-up fight; it was not in Sector's interest to advertise what fools they had been. I made the assumption that everyone would pause and apply spin, so that they would be more likely to get the political outcome that suited themselves from the inevitable military action. The situation is too delicate and too important to piss around with, and I acted on the expectation that everyone involved was smart enough to realise that.  
'I was wrong. There are five parties involved, not three: the illegitimate elements of the sector government, who I had intended to separate out later, took senselessly drastic action to attempt to conceal their crimes; and the rebels' local allies, who also turned out to be a more separate faction than they had any interest being.  
'The Alliance presence here is now more exposed than-' he dropped the joke he had been intending, remembering the presence of two female officers- 'never mind the analogies. Large rebel ships are so rare that every independent hunting group in the galaxy will be baying for the privilege of coming here. For the rebs, to stay is to die. They've already risked and lost too much against us, so I reckon they are going to cram every available cubic nanometre of those ships with as much of the machinery of the yards, and the defences of them, as they can manage, and run.  
'The rRasfenoni, I have to admit I don't know what to expect from them, whether they will turtle up, blame their ancestors, make a sacrifice of a few chosen conspirators, go down fighting in a blaze of hatred - I am far from certain what is to be expected, how much of the rationality to plan something like their expansionist policy and how much of the madness to choose to do it in the first place.'

'We have an infestation of journalists,' Lennart said, 'the only element of the political process more corrupt than the politicians themselves, so I am going to go and lie like a bastard, apply some spin to buy us as much more time as I can. 'Gethrim, send for that duracrete, then get some sleep while you wait for it to arrive.  
'Captain Tevar, take the remaining escorts of Fourth Superiority and attach yourself to 851-Yod as the fifth line of the group. Reckon on having six hours to make what repairs you can.  
'While I'm having my tongue forked, I want plans drawn up for the last round of the mid game - three kidnappings. Vice-Admiral Domenic Gerlen: as I reckon it, he is one of the highest ranking officers in the sector not up to his eyeballs in the Moff's little scam. We need to leave someone alive to rebuild afterwards; he'll do.  
'Doctor Edward Nygma, consultant attached patrol and escort command; he's a Ubiqtorate plant, he has a useful load of evidence and I don't reckon he's going to last long with it unless we get him into protective custody.  
'Third thing. Commander Falldess.'

'Captain?' She replied.

'Your ship's too badly damaged to commit to action as soon as we need her. Find something somewhere else in the sector group that you can steal, and plan a cutting-out action accordingly.'

Aye, aye, Sir,' Falldess said, smiling. She had been afraid she was going to be left out.

'Then-' The hairs on the back of Lennart's neck stood up and there was a surge of tension in the air; he wondered if any of the rest of them could feel it. An approaching presence.  
The door slid open, and Kor Alric was there, looking strangely energised, like a ballistic man. He was on his path, with the speed and the power he had set off with behind him, but drifting now.

'Captain Lennart, I have been turning your words over in my head, and I have come to a conclusion,' he said, in a slightly detached tone, a man infested by the Force - not absolutely rooted in reality any more.

The stormtroopers raised their guns. Mirannon tried to shake some life back into his head. The bridge team and the rest of the squadron shrank away from him; he looked at them all as if noticing them for the first time.

'What are you doing?' he asked Lennart.

'Conspiring against the sector government. Care to join us?'


	34. Chapter 34

'Do you think you can say such things and walk away from them? Do you think you can attempt to unravel the logic of the universe and not have it whiplash round and bite you?' Adannan demanded of Lennart.

'Trust me,' Lennart said, deciding to be silly to keep Adannan's attention focused on him, 'the very last mythological entity you are qualified to stand in for is the logic of the universe. Is this something you want to discuss for all to hear, or would you rather talk about it, whatever it is, on the hoof?'

'Clear the room.' He gestured, with an unlit lightsabre. 'All of you.'

Some of them stood, but Lennart shook his head. 'Very backwards way of doing it. We have operational planning that needs to be done, and it would be more efficient if you and I wandered off while they stayed here.'

'I couldn't care less about-' he started to shout, angrily. Then he realised how well that would go down with the assembled navy officers. 'You devious bastard. Will you ever stop trying to trap me?'

'Will you ever stop extending pseudopodia of the will that are just too tempting to ignore?' Lennart fired back. 'Now, I could start going on about rationality, and maybe you would be irrational enough to take up the opposite position and maybe not…'

Adannan, wisely, did not rise to the bait this time. Instead, he looked around the room at the assembled officers. The one to beware of was the chief engineer, he saw at once. Dog tired, half asleep, but in his daily work and subconscious way, he made far more use of the Force than he thought. He would be a credible enemy.

'Perhaps this would best be conducted in private,' Adannan admitted. One thing; from the way the members of the squadron were reacting to him, not all of them had even been aware that he was on board. Which, from the command point of view, contained more than a little truth.

Lennart toyed with the idea of announcing "Why not? I already have you on record conspiring against the Empire anyway." And telling the command team about all the private discussions Mirannon's backscatter tap had intercepted. Perhaps, but there was still that final piece of the puzzle missing. Motive.

'Well, I'm late for the press conference anyway, and you may want to be there. If I ever do snap, embrace the dark side and start butchering people with a lightsabre, it'll probably be a room full of journalists.'

Adannan nodded, strode out, trying to look menacing. 'Carry on,' Lennart told the assembled officers, then strolled out in the same general direction; the stormtroopers all followed behind.

'What was that about?' Tevar asked the command team.

'Skipper recently got diagnosed as a Force sensitive,' Brenn stated. 'Kor Alric's an agent of the privy council; he's here trying to kill three birds with one stone - adopt him as his apprentice, and political oversight dealing with the situation.'

That was only two possibilities. Tevar was about to say so when she remembered Mirannon's 'missing piece of the puzzle'. That would be it. Instead she asked 'Diagnosed when?'

'A week - no, it was only what, two days ago,' Brenn stated.

'The Jedi Order used to recruit virtually out of the cradle,' Vehrec pointed out. 'Captain Lennart's what, mid-forties, late maybe?'

'Four years at Raithal, too,' Mirannon pointed out.

'So…' Falldess considered. 'Being a guardian of peace and justice is one thing, but I thought the Jedi were illegal?'

'It's more complicated than that,' Brenn said. 'He hates the idea. That time as an instructor means he knows, maybe not everything, but more than enough about how to be a problem pupil.'  
Time to be bold. 'Kor Alric Adannan has tortured two of his own staff and attempted the murder by slow torture of two more. He is scum of the first order, no better and maybe worse than the criminals we're trying to kick out. The reason you haven't heard much from him is that Captain Lennart's been shielding you from him, so far.'

'So where does this go?' Vehrec asked.

'For you, nowhere unless things go catastrophically wrong. You're naval officers, doing the Starfleet's work, in the Imperial interest. That's enough. Let the flagship sweat out the politics,' Brenn said.

The ship and line commanders of the rest of the squadron looked at each other, unconvinced.

In the turbolift heading down to the briefing room in the troop bay where the journos had been herded, Lennart was studiously looking at the ceiling.

'You're making a mistake there,' Adannan said. 'You should have taken somebody's head.'

'A lot of Imperial officers I know would have,' Lennart admitted. 'As it is, Guillemot's commander, Skardin, is going to be broken and dismissed the service.  
'Sometimes, the enemy just wins. Has more power, is quicker on the draw, or has fortune on their side. I don't see the sense in killing off someone, theoretically one of our own, who did an otherwise skillful job but was beaten by brute force or dumb luck.'

'Skardin?'

'Could have done better. If you want to know what my criteria for failure are, there's the living example. He blundered in, twice - failed to warn a friendly ship of an enemy, exposed himself carelessly to attack, got his ship unnecessarily damaged and some of his crew unnecessarily killed. Arrogant, clumsy, unworthy of trust and unlikely to learn.'

'Yet Lieutenant-Commander Raesene, who virtually sponsored a personal attack on you, goes unpunished? I can just comprehend not using your authority for personal gain, but not using it to defend yourself passes belief,' Adannan said.

'What's to defend against? Those agents were meant to pose a political risk that has been overtaken by events, which is why I can have them filleted if needs be. Raesene backed the local, and losing, side - so far - which means he is depending on me not lowering the boom on him as well.  
'I don't know what he thought he was doing to begin with. He is a good ship commander, he could probably have made his own way anyway - one of the reasons I chose him for the squadron. He shouldn't have needed a desperate gamble like that to push his career on. I haven't rubbed it in, because I don't want him to be pushed towards doing anything reckless in order to try to get back into my good books. Same with Barth-Elstrand, yelling at him would be counterproductive.'

'I don't think so. That's not enough. They are not sufficiently afraid of you; they look to you for wit, for experience - as if to an elder brother, in fact. That is something which you are not, and cannot be,' Adannan stated.

'Your traditions are the traditions of a wolf among sheep; believing that others need to be driven to war. I am a Starfleet officer, and so are the men and women of my command; they have chosen this path, worked hard to get as far along it as they have. I chose the path of a wolf among wolves. Oh, pride and ambition and the knowledge that I could do better than many, but at the root, as an organism, I never aspired to be more than primus inter pares,' Lennart admitted.

'The Force will not permit you to remain merely that,' Adannan challenged. 'You must strive to be prinzip uber alles.'

'I'm far from certain of that, linguistically or as a matter of the art of command. War is confusion and madness; it's bad enough that the enemy want to kill you without feeling that your own comrades want your blood as well,' Lennart said.

'There is still far too much of the teacher in you,' Adannan said, 'as well as a frightening amount of optimist. What about your worst failure? Your executive officer. You destroyed his mind by being kind to him.'

'I tried to make him grow, and it's not over yet, unless you've assassinated him in the meantime,' Lennart said, looking carefully at Adannan to try and tell if he had.  
'You're going to tell me that if I had kept up pressure on him, reinforced the rigid self-control he held himself under, his internal problems wouldn't have got out of hand and he would still be a functional officer?'

'That man trained himself, accepted life's wounds and turned them into a strength in a manner that did him nothing but credit, a most useful minion - and you chose to waste that,' Adannan charged.

'You intend to draw parallels between your treatment of your underlings and my treatment of mine, trying to prove to me that I'm no better than you are?' Lennart said, and meant to go on.

'Do you really think you can only descend to my level? Do you think there aren't more and greater monsters out there? You want to know why I'm plundering the dangerous past - do you have the nerve to stand and listen while I tell you?' Adannan challenged him.

Aleph-3 could hardly contain herself. This was, would be, her job Lennart was going to do, the task she had been bred for - and she couldn't, because she thought the team would have to stay here to get between them and stop them tearing each other apart, if necessary. Or would that work?

Perhaps it was essential to do exactly that, now, distract them because otherwise - she had no idea what Adannan was about to say, knew that it would be dangerous to hear.

'Kor Alric, Captain. May I- could I…'

'What?' they both said.

'This is my original purpose, what I was born and brought up for. If you had something else to discuss, I could handle the conference.' Kriff it, she hadn't meant to sound enthusiastic.

'You don't know what lies I'm planning to tell,' Lennart said.

'No, but you don't exactly have a prepared speech either, and if you give me the bones of the argument I can make it up as I go along.' All right, maybe he had a point, she thought. She wasn't supposed to be actually enthusiastic about this.

'I'm still going to need to be there, to field questions,' Lennart pointed out.

'Not unusual. I do the part about telling them what we want them to think, you have all the fun of the creative response required to head them off before they start thinking too much.' Did she lean too heavily on that? Glance inadvertently at Kor Alric when saying that?  
Probably. Kor Alric was about to invite him to speculate on the behaviour of - invite Lennart to join him in turning against - the Privy Council, and just possibly their ultimate superior, His Imperial Majesty Palpatine the First.

If he does that, she thought, his head is mine. Well. Assuming I can actually take him, that is. What if he's telling the truth, though? What if he can prove that higher authority has betrayed our trust?

What difference would it make? She told herself it would make none, and knew she was lying.

The republic had betrayed the trust of its citizens, she and her kin had had that drilled into them as an article of faith - by people who, if she was right, had every incentive to lie to them. And it had lasted, up to a point - and then collapsed in civil war. In a quieter time, it might be put up with, or at least there might be no alternative. Now? Chaos and rebellion.

What if that proof is on Ord Corban? Of course it is. That's what Kor Alric wants, for us to go and dig it up for him, take it, implicate us - and have no choice in turning against His Majesty with him.

And now that I have taken counsel of my own fears, she cautioned herself firmly, I refuse to believe that it is so. More importantly for my own immediate survival, I refuse to behave as if I believe it to be so. Damn, this conference is going to be harder than I thought.

Lennart looked carefully at her; she still had her helmet down so there were no facial expressions to give her away, but he was looking at her as if she must be revealing something. Fortunately he had enough sense not to ask. Or he was thinking in that general direction already.

'Right. You do the opening and standard blurb. Admit that the sector group screwed up, we're here to cover for them because that's exactly what a regional support group does. Mistakes were made and are being fixed, it's a real war, occasionally the enemy does something competent, no soft centre crap. We can't take them with actually that would work perfectly.'

'What?' Aleph-3 and Adannan both said. He had picked up the sudden switch in direction in Lennart's surface thoughts, the blur of implication that meant the captain had had an idea.

'How do we explain Ord Corban away? It's not supposed to exist. This is the bright idea; we hide it in plain sight. We explain the place away as an Alliance base, built up with alien help on the site of an old fleet depot from the Light and Darkness War. The minerals and the holes in the ground would all have been still there, that much makes sense, and best of all, nothing to do with us. No dark secrets, no classified experiments, no lost one of a kind technologies, just a useful shovelful of blame. Play it right and we can even afford to take them with us to see it.  
'We can embed them - never mind what I'd actually prefer to embed them in. Play up the problems with Sector, and play down the issue with the rebels- imply if they had any sense they'd all be long gone. Go with that.'

'You're making this fairly difficult for me. Press conferences usually aren't supposed to be this improvised,' Aleph-3 took off her helmet, and said.

'From sniper-scout to Jedi hunter, and you're telling me you want it easy?' Lennart said, joking. He handed her a wafer. 'Images to work with, background, stuff like that. You're up.'

'Shouldn't have been daft enough to volunteer, I suppose,' she admitted.

'I suppose that you expect me to loom at the back, and add a useful air of intimidatory menace to the proceedings?' Adannan said.

'You have the authority to go wherever you choose,' Lennart was careful to say, 'but I don't think you want to miss this chance for me to self-incriminate.'

'Now if that were only a promise,' Adannan bounced back.

The chamber was a ground forces briefing room, flat ranks of chairs around a raised platform, and there were the official escort and a group of interested spectators from the air wing. Most of them armed.

The journalists themselves were an interesting bunch, most of them simply representative of the type, but four seemed worth more notice, one way or the other. There was one absurdly well-dressed old man, with long white hair and beard, who had clearly been around; one tall, slightly stooped middle-aged man who dressed like a retired soldier. Both print journalists, used to analysis on the spot. They could be dangerous.  
Two holojournalists, both female, who seemed to have got their jobs on the basis of looks; one cream-skinned, green-eyed blonde, posing and bubbling for the camera, the other black-haired, trying to look cool and poised and powerful like a proper serious journalist - and more or less succeeding.

Lennart and Adannan walked in first and sat down behind the lectern, Lennart largely ignoring and Adannan darting venomous looks at the questioners, then Aleph-3 strode in as if she owned the place.

She was not unaware of how catastrophically stupid this was, from the point of view of operational security - her main job depended on disguise and lies, so fronting a holovised press briefing could be said to be quite mad. It had been a spur of the moment choice, a necessary sacrifice to keep the two of them apart - and may not even be working. She was here now. Game on.  
She made her entrance and slotted the datacard into the lectern; the first image that came up was 851's unit crest.

'Ladies, gentlemen - members of the press-' the old reporter at least got the joke - 'welcome on board HIMS Black Prince. I'm Warrant Second Aleph-3, and I'll be conducting your introductory briefing.'

'Excuse me.' The stooped man put his hand up. 'You are actually a member of the Stormtrooper Corps?'

Aleph-3 looked down at her exotic variant armour with the breastplate that had obviously been moulded for breasts. She grinned, looked at him and said, 'After consideration at certain levels of command, it was decided that dealing with journalists probably does constitute an infantry task.'

That got another chuckle, and Lennart started to relax. She was nervous, but obviously up to it, and she started to relax as she played herself in. He was only half listening as she laid out the situation. None of it was especially new to him, although he had to struggle not to raise an eyebrow at her version of events. She handled questions fairly well, too; when the old journo stood up to ask what the sector authorities had done wrong to allow the situation to deteriorate to this stage, she actually managed to condemn them with tact and grace.

They had held on to a small problem, the alien presence and their links to the Alliance, believing they could deal with it, until long after it should have become obvious that they couldn't. At which point they had tried to cover it up, deceiving most of the rest of the sector. Who precisely 'they' were, she was careful to avoid sayin,; but she did mention that although fundamentally a political, even an intelligence problem, there were definitely changes, and charges, to be made.

She looked very pointedly at Adannan as she said that, clearly implicating him in that side of things, and he glared back as if he was considering frying her on the spot. Actually, a plan B had just popped into his head, and he had her to thank for it. Which he might do with lightning anyway.

She put the finger on failures within the sectoral administration, with the comment that their most devastating failure was one of trust, to believe that authority could and would help them with the problem. This was not the devious past, it was the new Order, and she said that with such a deliciously innocent expression on her face everyone, especially the old soldier, knew what a pack of lies it was and that she was in effect daring them to say so. It hung together exceeding well; there were a couple of nasty moments when the old, white haired one asked about possible collusion to keep the ugly little secret. Lennart stood up to take that one, but Aleph-3 managed to read his mind.

She gave the response, couldn't have been better with a script, that it certainly looked that way. On preliminary investigation, it looked very strongly as if a lot of the evidence was fake; the rebels had manufactured evidence of collusion between themselves and the sector government, in order to implicate and destroy otherwise trustworthy servants of the Empire. It was a good cover for all sorts of strange behind the scenes manoeuvring, and an interesting piece of doublethink in its own right, and naturally, those who understood it didn't need to speak up.

Which left the ex-model airhead. 'So, the rebels are using stuff that's, like, a thousand years old? Eww, dust.'

'You live,' Aleph-3 said coldly and cuttingly, 'in the world of fashion, don't you?' There was a quick chuckle of laughter from the dark-haired one, and most of the other journalists. 'The technology hasn't changed much, and use matters more than time to the machinery. It's all too practical, unfortunately.'

'If I can ask you a more personal question,' one of the journalists from the floor said, 'It can't be easy being a woman in the Imperial military, especially not the Stormtrooper Corps.'

'It's not supposed to be easy for anyone, being in the Corps,' she snapped, then softened it with a smile. 'There are few of us, and mostly in specialised roles, but we still have to meet the same high general standards.'

'Being surrounded by fit, strong men…' the blonde said, under her breath.

'How did I know you were going to say that?' Aleph-3, who had overheard.  
'In all seriousness, in the chemicals of our lives, adrenalin outranks testosterone and estrogen, and Tibanna gas has the measure of them all. The enemy doesn't care, and we all have to be able to do our share of the task, and trust our fellow troopers to do the same. A poor comrade gets very little slack cut and even less mercy, no matter how pretty her face might be,' she added.

'I think I can safely say that if that ethic applied in our profession, we would all be dead by now,' the ex-military journalist said, and got several venomous glares that said he would have been one of the first on the chopping block.

'Haven't sector group behaved like very poor comrades towards you, though?  
'By my count, regional support units and elements of Sector seconded to them have been responsible for the destruction or capture of two light destroyers, one heavy frigate, four medium frigates, two light frigates, and numerous smaller craft, whereas the one operation the Sector fleet has undertaken seems to have cost them heavily for little return.'

Aleph-3 was still wondering how to take that when Lennart stood up and said, 'It's all right, I'll field that one.'

The journalists took note - how could they not? - of his rank, and a forest of flashbulbs went off; for a moment the order, 'Shoot the next man who fires off a flash' hovered on the tip of his tongue; Adannan would probably approve, though.

'As the commanding officer of the pursuit squadron, it should be my job to tell you what happens next. To put it simply, sector saw the situation as just that kind of rivalry between Imperial units, and took a large gamble attempting to regain their reputation and their honour. They forgot what the rebels had to say about it.  
'As any of you who remember the clone wars will know, it is perfectly possible for men - and women - to fight with conviction and imagination in even the most lost and unjust cause. The rebels set an ambush that I expected, and intended to deal with in my own time, in my own way.  
'Sector believed themselves to be in a race with us, saved time on operational analysis, and jumped straight into the trap. Again this comes back to key elements' failure to trust in, and coordinate with, higher authority.  
'The reason I'm here talking to you, instead of chasing down the Alliance elements and capitalising on what damage Sector did manage to do to them, is that I have every reason to expect the Alliance knows the score as well as we do. The most powerful weapon in war - rumours of new superlasers notwithstanding - is the initiative. Force the pace and place of the action, and you can force the enemy to react to you, and use what he has less than fully effectively. In one of the incidents just passed, I took an enemy destroyer-carrier by forcing the action so that it seemed not to have time to deploy its full fighter wing, for instance.  
'The rebels have won a defensive victory that was probably as much a surprise to them as it was to the sector group, but remaining in place, against the heavies of a regional support group, would be suicidal. They know that major force units will chase them, so I expect, and we are in the process of confirming, that they left the theatre about ten minutes after the last shot was fired. Our next move is to reorganise and pursue.'

Was that believable? Did that sound like an overconfident Imperial officer who was sure he could deliver success where others had failed, failing to think critically enough and putting too much trust in his own logic? Would the rebels think that he thought they had done the obvious and rational thing, and therefore they had room to accomplish the risky but profitable? Hopefully. Looking at the journalists, they were an odd mix of the indoctrinated-to-the-eyeballs and the deeply sceptical - but enough of the former.

'Any of you who are willing to take the risk, give your names and your publication to my press officer, we'll see if we can find somewhere to embed you.'

Lennart pushed the door of the conference room open, manually; most of the assembled officers realised how long it had been since their commander had got any real rest or sleep.

'You're not going to be much good if you're too shattered to think straight, Captain,' Rythanor pointed out.

'Funny, that; dealing with Kor Alric, warped and twisted seems to do more or less all right. What have you managed to come up with?'

'Well, we couldn't come up with any plan that would take less than three years of computer time to track the Doctor down; so we came up with this: We know where Admiral Gerlen lives and works - we have a standard smash and grab planned, but instead, a special ops hit team goes after him disguised as Rebels; they kidnap him, and threaten to kill him unless the sector group hands Dr Nygma over to the Alliance.'

'Right. That's it? That's the best you could do, get someone else to do the head-hurting part for you?' Lennart said.

'Well,' Brenn said, 'it does have the merit of economy of effort.'

'True,' Lennart admitted, 'but it trades that for the supreme disadvantage of taking too stang long. Think about this, think about the target. He has taken elaborate and highly competent precautions in the realm of data, not to be found; what will he have forgotten? Where do the limits of his preparation lie? He doesn't have an unlimited attention span, there are limits to how far ahead he can plan-' unless he's coded up simulations of his own personality and allowed them to do some of his thinking for him, Lennart thought. Crap.

'Skipper?' Brenn suggested. 'We did think of just asking him.'

'That might work. Unless he's already gone on the run. Do that, but prepare for the worst as well. Look for traffic flow; I don't care how many randomisers and anonymisers he uses, it all has to make its way back to him eventually. He'll be covered somehow, business as a front. Check for more going in than comes out. Check for ridiculously overloaded mobile comms accounts, too.  
'Assuming he's being pursued by Black Sun, use sector's data net to watch them watching him. The physical pickup should be easy, the detection is hard. Which is the opposite situation for Vice-Admiral Gerlen. What's the plan for that?'

'Customs corvettes,' Vehrec said. 'Send the group in, their sensors can do interior scans of the base - it's a twin garrison tower; conventional garrison emplacement and hollowed out one in use as a command facility. Straight hit and run with the customs troops and platoons of the boarding batallion.'

'Alternatively,' Raesene suggested, 'we do have two highly authentic ISB warrant cards.' Interesting that he was the one to bring that up; in pre-emptive self defence. Before anyone else could mention the fact, and trying to gain some credit by it.

'Customs unit's probably more believable in that role than the Starfleet. 17-Blue are too busy, one of the other scout teams - 06 Blue, they should be able to pull it off. Them and a platoon from the boarding batallion just in case.'

Commander Falldess was grinning, so Lennart just had to ask.

'All right, you may as well admit it. How far does your ambition stretch?'

'Hialaya Karu,' Falldess said, pointing at the open image on the ID manual in front of her, which the system recognised and displayed on the main viewer. She looked quite surprised, checked to make sure it was, then said 'That one.'

'I know what a Karu-class light destroyer can do, thank you,' Lennart said. 'I also recall their crew complement is around four thousand. You don't have that many warm bodies available.'

The Karu-class were a pre-clone wars design, but one which had not been produced in numbers until well after the foundation of the Empire. A consortium design, several minor shipyards led by Damorian having a go at Kuat's market share, it had been an open question which side it was going to end up on. In fact, it was one of the ships the Victory had been designed to counter.

They had almost a thousand 'g' less acceleration than an Imperator, which made them merely average, but a healthy weapon load. Not many fighters but a decent intervention outfit.

Interestingly, when they had been produced for the Starfleet, it had been Kuat who had done so, buying the consortium out and using their own bridge module type.

'Delvran?' Lennart asked. 'Have you got two thousand crewmen you can afford to lose?'

Creditably, Dordd did not say what crossed his mind - that he had eleven thousand he wanted rid of. He did glare at Lennart, visibly thinking; you bastard. Why do you tempt me like this?

'They are tripping over each other's feet. Leaning down might encourage them to take more individual responsibility and sharpen up. I can spare two thousand. Three, if you need them,' Dordd said, trrying to make it sound as if it was a gift rather than a curse.

Two problems, one solution. Synergy in action, Lennart thought.

'Right, an engineering detail will stay with Tarazed Meridian; the rest of the crew, transfer to Dynamic who will do the boarding action.' He gave his orders. 'Platoon BD32 and team 06 Blue to 'The Silent Bugler', go after Vice-Admiral Gerlen. I-' yawn- 'find Nygma, fast. Oh, and signal for assistance to 851, we are definitely going to need some backup on this. And did the Chief remember-'

'Tankers are on their way, Skipper,' Brenn confirmed. 'Duracrete, too.'

There he was, all two metres twenty-two of him, more if you included the haircut. Sitting there like a half-collapsed wall, over a bowl full of little bitty green, yellow, orange and red fingernail-sized cubes. Diced peppers for breakfast? She had to talk to him about his diet, at the very least.

'Commander Mirannon?' she said, tentatively.

'Ah. Z B,' he said, raising his head then nearly letting it fall back into the bowl.

She blushed. 'You noticed that, did you?'

'Had it brought to my attention. Surgeon-Lieutenant Omar who scripted that, wasn't it?' Mirannon said.

'Yes, it was.' A junior member of her department, who had quite possibly been put up to it by someone else, but he would do. She had been very angry with him, so angry that she had done something quite unofficial. Mirannon seemed to be amused by the whole business, more than anything else.

'I've already taken measures against him. It won't happen again,' she said, sternly. Was that what he wanted to hear, the presentation that would get through to him? The cool, effective professional? Was that the best way for her to get through to him - what did he want, really? A mate, a partner in crime? Someone cool and distant, to place on a pedestal? Fire and passion?

'Ah,' Mirannon said. 'What was it you had done to him?' He looked disappointed in her; why?

'I administered unofficial punishment,' she said, trying to convey the message that she could break the rules too.

'I rigged the airsystem to flood his room with crowd control D,' Mirannon said, casually. Unofficially known to most of the security forces that used it as 'Bad Trip Gas', it was a mild incapacitant and potent hallucinogen. It filled would-be rioters with a feeling of advanced paranoia shading to total dread, the sense that something terrible was going to happen to them very soon - which, faced with imperial riot police, was usually the case anyway.

'Oh, dear,' she said, trying not to grin, knowing that it was terribly wrong.

'Problem?'

'Yes. I, ah, had him dosed with a hyperaesthetic - boosts peripheral, particularly sensory nerve function.' Which would magnify the skin-crawling feeling, the sickening sensation of plummeting out of control, the auditory and visual phantoms that hung at the edge of your vision like nightmares waiting for you to close your eyes and become prey.

Mirannon grunted, probably in amusement. 'Anybody even capable of faking that writing style probably deserves it.'

'I have to ask - why are you eating that multicoloured melange? Has it been nutritionally balanced?' she said, not really what she had intended to say at all.

'No. Brain food, for when I'm asleep,' Mirannon said, taking another forkful while she puzzled over that. She called in a minor emergency - asked someone to check in on Lieutenant Omar, while he was eating, then said, 'There are easier ways of stimulating dreams.'

'Not trying to,' Mirannon said. 'Keeps my brain ticking over, so I can think about problems while I'm asleep.'

'That is quite strange,' she said, puzzled. 'You're able to control your dreams?'

'Subconscious calculation. More or less. Wild ass guesswork, actually, but filtering out the crudely, obviously wrong possibilities means I waste less time when I'm awake.' Mirannon watched her as that sank in. 'And you haven't twigged that I'm making this up as I go along yet?'

'You're what? Oh. I suppose it was silly of me to believe a known practical joker.'

Well, she thought, one rise deserves another. Let's see how he takes this. 'The tricks you could play, with the power of the Force-'

'Would be impressive and hard to trace, but that in itself would spoil most of the fun,' he said.

'Fun?' she said, mock-incredulously.

'I haven't put very many people in hospital…'

'From your perspective, maybe,' she reminded him. 'Actually, I was thinking abut the Force. I'm fairly sure the Jedi missed a lot of what there was to know.'

'Unlikely. They existed almost as long as the Republic; they couldn't have been fools for all that time.' Mirannon said.

'You are a rationalist. So much of one that you have to vent from time to time, in elaborate and dangerous jokes.' She was watching him closely, to see if he agreed with her assessment of himself. 'So much so that you expect rationality from what must have been the most disconnected group in the galaxy.'

He didn't. 'Maybe I just like really elaborate practical jokes. There was enough time, and there must have been enough competence, not least in order to last that long, to fill out the envelope of possibility. Even if there were quasi-religious objections and limits to what was done, they must have been aware of what could have been done.'

'I don't think they did. We have a – two body problem.' She stumbled slightly, trying to speak his jargon. 'A Force using man consists of two parts: the Force, and the man. One of those, I can make a difference to.'

'I think I can make you more powerful.' Blei-Korberkk said, and realised she had said something very wrong from the look that spread over Mirannon's face.

'If you value your own life,' he said, deliberately, 'do not mention the possibility to anyone who Kor Alric might be able to find out about it from. He was a trauma surgeon; give him the sign of a medical problem to do with the Force, and he will go straight through you to get to it.'

Actually, Mirannon thought, that might make a cover story…but who would they need one for? Who were the middle ground between those who needed to know nothing and those who were allowed to know everything?

She was disappointed by that. 'I thought you would need all the advantage that you could get. That with what I've managed to ferret out of the neurochemistry and biochemistry of the Force, I could give you an edge.'

Mirannon put one hand over his bowl, just in case. 'To do that would attack him with his own strengths. Pointless. Take years to learn, and I can't do that kind of time compression.'

'This is a new thing. If anybody's ever done this before, they left no records.' She meant to go on and say, and I have made the breakthrough; but Mirannon countered with

'Everyone who tried this before either found nothing to report or got themselves disappeared without trace, and that makes you think it's a good idea?'

'When you put it like that…' she admitted.

'Maybe it's logical. There are more than enough legends and records of the Force influencing the organism, and there are more than enough indications of feedback loops in the Force, but the overwhelming majority of the previous researchers either had it suppressed by the light or ripped out of their bleeding hands by the dark. Find something else to worry about. Concentrate on that, fill your mind with it, and ignore this until well after we're rid of him. And you'd probably do better to ignore it then, too.'

'You're actually worried about me…' she said.

'Where else can I find a medic willing to help me torment junior officers of her department?' Mirannon said, standing up.

'If I had asked you not to, would you have left him alone?'

'Probably not, but I might have used a lower concentration,' Mirannon admitted. 'If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go and have some of those nightmares now.'

Detention cells were never happy places. Generally, even less so when the staff knew what they were doing.

There hadn't been time or resources to process the mass of rebel prisoners properly, but normally a jailbird would be stripped, scanned, decontaminated, and given an Engineering-castoff boiler suit, degree of itchiness directly related to degree of offence. That and some other things, like the flickering of the deliberately old-school lights, the smells, the noisiness of the plumbing, and the mind-rotting qualities of the 'soothing' background music. A really unwelcome guest might arrive at interrogation from the holding cell half-broken and three quarters mad already.

Squadron Leader Rahandravell seemed to be having good care taken of her, but she had still been tethered to the cell wall by her ankles, just in case. She couldn't get as far as the cell door, so there was no reason not to show her visitor in.

'How are you doing?' Aron asked her, worried.

'Annoyed,' she said. 'Cooped up like this-' she clinked one cable-tied anklet off the other. 'Waiting for a decision. To find out if I get a slap on the wrist, a transfer to the penal infantry or just a few thousand volts. I-'

She winced and doubled over, curled up on the bed and let out a low moan that turned into a long, bubbling cough.

'Do that too often and they may not need to execute you,' Aron said, but draping her blanket over her as he did. 'What the kriff were you thinking?'

'Thinking it was a quick, straightforward way of getting back in the saddle. Ow.' She winced. 'I didn't even steal it, I just borrowed it. Ungrateful sod.'

'Is that any way to talk about your commanding officer? Look, what you did was ludicrously nuts, for several different reasons. Taking that bird, which seems to have been earmarked for you anyway, is the least of your problems. What you did with it - and that puts you another three kills ahead of me, damn you-' he grinned, trying to inject some humour into the process, and failed - 'well, you gave it a fair shakedown and nothing broke. Helping save the Captain's butt when he dangled it out in the breeze isn't going to earn you too many black marks, either.  
'No, what he's really annoyed about, and what you should be blazing mad at yourself over,' Aron told her with some authority, 'maybe will be once your brain starts working again, are two things.'

'What the kriff did you think you were doing checking out of a hoverchair into a cockpit? You weren't fit, you were a danger to yourself. How did your judgement lapse that badly, and are you going to be crazy enough to do it again?  
'Second, most pilots are a bit mad. All of the half-way decent ones, anyway. Sometimes you get pilots who take all the risks they can get away with, and have the sense to body-swerve the ones they couldn't, and they go on to be group captains and air commodores.' Aron paused, took a deep breath, then carried on.  
'You know how much of the fresh meat we're getting out of the academies now is a lot crazier than it's earned any real right to be. On average, they're nowhere near as good as they think they are. What kind of example was that to set? How are you ever going to enforce discipline, slap someone down for nearly getting themselves or their mates killed, when they can look at you and point to this? Kriff it, Franjia, were you actually trying to make up for a lifetime of good judgement in one lunatic move?'

'I…think I might have been,' she said, sceptically. 'It would be a wonderful excuse if it was true, but I really felt very strange doing that. Sort of as if I was watching myself do something that was already a habit, that slipped past below deliberate thought. Even if I was,' she shook her head, 'it was probably the medication. Something so normal and to be expected that I didn't need to think consciously and rationally about it.'

'Could have been the effects of the Force,' Aron suggested.

'Aron? "A Jedi made me do it" isn't a valid defence any more,' Franjia said. 'It would be an excuse definitely worth having. In a way, it would make perfect sense. I felt as if nothing was out of place, while I was doing something that was ludicrously nuts. But that sounds too good to be true. So much like a perfect way out that, if I were passing judgement on me, I'd suspect me of making it up.'

'Why?' Aron asked. Not why make something like that up, why would anyone do that in the first place, what would the motive be? Given that there were only three Force users on board, one of them was too busy, the other two- 'The only people who could have done that are the Captain himself, and Kor Alric.'

'Shoot me now,' she said, and more than half meant it.

'Fifty-fifty chance,' Aron stated.

'No, it's worse than that. He was here, the Captain wasn't, and I don't think he'd do that anyway.'

'I don't know, the Force is supposed to be able to do some damn funny things. One of the ideas the captain hates it so much. Subversive of all real discipline, and that. Subconsciously, he might have wanted you to come and save him,' Aron speculated.

'It's a lot more likely that Kor Alric was responsible, trying to destroy my career so he can have me transferred to his retinue, to replace the last pilot he murdered. Kriff it, Aron, how do things like this happen? How do men like him exist, and how do they get to be important enough to torment people for fun?' Franjia said, strain in her voice.

'I don't know,' Aron said, and tried not to think about the next obvious question: what do we do about it?


	35. Chapter 35

Six customs corvettes and two larger ships, the increasingly heavily worked Provornyy and her sister Grey Princess, departed Ghorn II in one direction, the light destroyer Dynamic in another.

On board the light destroyer, all was in ferment. Dordd was trying not to let his own instincts get the better of him to the detriment of the service as a whole, by lumbering Falldess with more of his idiots than she could cope with.

So far, he wasn't doing too well.

He had just about reached the stage of considering that, well, familiarity probably had bred contempt, and a change of environment would do them good, sharpen them up, that his slime might start behaving more like sailors if they got a fresh start, and she could cope with the contents of Detention Block 17A, when there was a signal at the door.

'Enter,' he said.

It was Lieutenant Pellor Aldrem. Lieutenant "You know, I never knew how much fun being a petty tyrant can be until now" Aldrem. Lieutenant "That was pathetic. You call that an attempt to frag your commanding officer? This is how you're supposed to do it" Aldrem. The man who had landed on his gunnery department like a brick being heaved through a window.

'I know now that I made a major mistake recommending Mirhak-Ghulej to succeed me as exec of Black Prince, but I never expected Captain Lennart to use you to punish me for it,' Dordd said, more bitterly than he had intended.

'No, Sir, he didn't; that was all our own work,' Aldrem decided he could get away with saying. That was the worst part of being an officer - taking responsibility. Admitting to what you had done was never a good general principle.

'Really?' Dordd said, standing up. He looked a bit like a praying mantis, Aldrem thought. 'Are you telling me that drugging Lieutenant Gavrillom, dressing him in a mynock costume, and gluing him to the bridge viewscreens was your idea?'

'I have no idea who actually perpetrated that, Sir,' Aldrem said, more carefully now. Dordd seemed in too black a mood for humour to reach him. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

'Dewback-shit. I'm still trying to work out where you got a costume big enough to fit over a spacesuit, though.'

Aldrem refused to fall for it this time. 'Looked cobbled together to me, Sir. Clever, though.'

'And at least slightly more humorous than three charges of assault, one of attempted murder, fifteen disobeying an order, six striking a superior officer, eighty disrespect, a hundred and seventeen charges of conduct unbecoming, and one rape,' Dordd said coldly.

'Damn. Lost the bet,' Aldrem grumbled.

'You had a bet on the subject of onboard discipline? With whom?' Dordd said, somewhere between shock and rage.

'With the dorsal-mid divisional officer, whether I could find more charges to bring against his people than he could against mine,' Aldrem said, mock-casually. 'Not that it was ever really official or anything, but they were winning because I couldn't find any way to make incompetence count as an offence.'

' "Failure to carry out your duties", section 7 chapter 4 para 23 clause 5,' Dordd pointed out.

'Ah. Hadn't picked up on that. Good, that puts us ahead again, by twenty-six field punishments,' Aldrem said.

'I do not believe,' Dordd tried to get his spinning head under control, 'that even you would be capable of being so ridiculously casual about the good order of the Starfleet. Have you any explanation to offer?'

'Yes, Captain Dordd, I do,' The ex-Senior Chief Petty Officer said, changing tone himself, becoming cold and official. 'Assume I had the sense to realise this was going to be a clusterkriff - what would you expect me to set up?'

'Make such a farce and a mockery out of the process,' Dordd realised, 'that the whole sorry mess would have to go all the way up to a full court of inquiry to get untangled.'

'Capital charges involving an officer, so that should reach squadron command level,' Aldrem confirmed. 'It's not that we don't trust you, but some of your people really need their heads banged together, and this seemed a good way to arrange it. I don't think Captain Lennart realises how bad things really are.'

'What about the actual charges? I can't let you run riot like this and get a hold of my own crew,' Dordd said.

'Most of that won't stand up; it was just us being ourselves, Sir - but I want the rape brought to trial, because we can blow that one away; the charge is utter crap. It was consensual and the incident report was filed by her jealous roommate.'

'And the attempted murder?' Dordd asked.

'Wouldn't have been attempted until I actually did it. Watching the way that moron ran his turret, watching him mishandle his gun pointers, I told your man I'd spreadeagle him over the centre gun barrel if he screwed up that badly again, and it wasn't a threat, it was a promise. I kicked him out before he could screw the pittin badly enough to force me to make good on it,' Aldrem said, anger evident. 'Seriously, sir, if he comes from a culture that still allows duelling, I'd happily sort it that way,' he added.

'Junior Lieutenant Nantengan won't be fit for a while. When you kicked him out, did you forget about the access shaft?'

'Slipped my mind in the heat of the moment, Sir,' Aldrem lied.

'Indeed. I don't suppose you know anything about the fire?' Dordd asked.

'Well, Sir, where there's living there's crime, as my grandfather the Detective Superintendent always used to say. You know Dynamic has more than her fair share of it, though. Too many spiceheads, and not in a good way.'

'Your grandfather was a fairly senior cop. No doubt you started learning your disrespect for the law at an early age,' Dordd commented.

'He did a stint in Internal Affairs, sir. He also said, when there's a lot of crime, the police are underfunded; when there's too much, the police are lazy; when there's far too much, they're complicit,' Aldrem said.

'Exactly the sort of logic I would expect from the maniac who disabled the suppression system, glued a chemical detector tuned for burning spice on the wall, and threw an incendiary grenade into one of the Regulatory Branch store complexes,' Dordd said.

'In that case, Captain, you should be happy. Someone else on this boat must have reasoning skills,' Aldrem deadpanned. 'Besides which, the detector came up with half a dozen different positives. Or so I heard.'

'It did. The internal security system also showed a senior rate attempting to destroy the detector in order to hide the evidence. I hate ordering executions,' Dordd said, grimly. 'Every one is a failure to reach them, on my part. The other side of authority; anything that goes wrong in your department is your fault. So what the kriff did I do wrong with you?'

'Sir, can I speak freely?' Aldrem said.

'You mean you haven't already? Go ahead.'

'You got this job because this crew are shit. Personnel Directorate thought that anyone who could keep a crew in order with the skipper in charge and Commander Mirannon as resident bad example had to be shit hot, so you got the job of beating them into order. Then fortune played the sick joke on you of needing them to be ready in as many days as you wanted months. It's a drastic situation, so you need to be drastic. The only way you're going to get them into shape in time is to chop bits off. I could name three, four hundred people that you would be better off spacing, because otherwise those kriffwits are going to be in a position to take the rest of us down with them.'

'Very harsh. Promotion to the officer class has changed you.' Dordd said. 'Let me see your list.'

Aldrem handed over a datacard. Captain Dordd plugged it in, compared it with the list of names on his own shit-list and the list of names he had intended to transfer to Falldess' command. A high degree of overlap. 'Are you really this comfortable condemning men? Writing them off to be fried?' he asked, as if he had to.

'Sir, the Imperial Starfleet gave me eight thirty-two teraton turbolasers to play with. You bet I'm comfortable with frying people,' Aldrem pointed out. 'Further down, second set of files; positive recommendations.'

'Junior Lieutenant Banks as C turret commander? Isn't she the one Leading Spaceman Suluur's accused of raping?' Dordd asked.

'Yes. Ahdria Banks is an airhead space cadet with no sense of reality, no surprise when you think she's been here for a while and still has some enthusiasm left, but she's got some intelligence and she's willing to learn. She won't be comfortable shooting at living targets, but for this coming fight she's actually the best technical gunner you've got,' Aldrem stated.

'How did she and Suluur get together?' Dordd wondered.

'After-training jam sessions. He plays the rombophone, she's a haultclerist. Her bunkie doesn't think she could find her ass with both hands, so there's no way she could get a man unless he forced himself on her. Sir, bring that one to trial, because otherwise the Imperial Medical Association are likely to bring my team up for unlicensed neurosurgery on the roommate.'

'Since when did I make you my executive officer?' Dordd asked, not meaning it seriously.

'Funny you should ask that, Captain,' Aldrem went only that far, at first.

It was, Dordd thought, glaringly obvious. Probably not true, though. 'In theory, Commander Ridatt carries a large share of responsibility for the situation. In practise, he's one of the few who actually still thinks enough about his career that I can inspire any kind of actual performance out of him. I need him too badly to prosecute, but for Force's sake don't tell him that.'

'Sir, if he's trying to do his job properly then there are a smenge of a lot of people under him who aren't,' Aldrem said, and decided not to go further. 'You must have realised you were due for your own command?'

'What?' Dordd said, briefly puzzled by the change of direction. 'Oh, I suppose I was. No guarantees, though. Enlisted personnel get promoted by officers, officers get promoted by shoreside chair polishers. I suppose your next question is going to be well, what the kriff did I expect, wine and roses?'

'No, actually, Sir. It was going to be, what do you want, and why are you letting this shower stop you from getting it? There's a time to let us stand back and do our own thing, a time to lead the way and let us follow, a time to stand at the back, point and shove, and a time to apply the boot up the arse. Captain Lennart's a pretty easy-going boss, now, because he's got the ship and the crew he wants. There aren't many of the long service crew he needs to throw the book at any more, and a lot of the time it was me and the team anyway.  
'Look, you joined Black Prince to replace Commander Torvelson just after we'd made our biggest score. We were a pretty strange bunch, space crazy to a man, and you thought you had to sort us out. You came in looking to leave your mark, apply footprints, and unless I miss my guess the skipper had you on the carpet a few times, didn't he?' Aldrem asked.

'It wasn't the carpet, it was the duraplast sheeting I was really scared of,' Dordd said. 'He did that once, for the fear, to remind me what it felt like to be on the receiving end of absolute authority.'

'But not recently,' Aldrem stated.

'Actually, he always rode fairly hard on the regulatory and disciplinary branches. Gunnery, he would forgive you almost anything up to a negligent discharge.'

'Is that what it looked like from the outside?' Aldrem said, amused. 'He kept a pretty close eye on us, but did most of it himself - as if we were a musical instrument he didn't trust anyone else, even his exec, to look after.  
'Never mind. The actual point is that most of the brutal part, the hammering into shape, had already got done in the first two years, and he could be a vicious bastard about it. At the start of his time on Black Prince he was ruthless, kicking out the people he didn't think were going to cut it. Time for you to do the same here, Sir.'

'Did you used to think this way before you got made up to officer status?' Dordd wondered.

'Sir, I'm one of the top hundred turret gunners, maybe one of the top four, in the entire void-damned Starfleet. You think I got to be this good by being stupid? You think anyone gets to be that good without being an elitist and a perfectionist? Difference is, I always tried not to let it eat me up. Not let that take me over to a point where I forgot why I wanted to do it in the first place.  
'Also, I was never responsible for anybody's competence but my own and my team's before. Now that I am, it's-' he shook his head. 'I'm turning into much more of a bastard than I thought I was.' He pointed at the datapad.

'What was it you actually came here for?' Dordd asked him.

'The team, the plan is for us to go back to Black Prince to take over the new heavy axial battery. We all decided to volunteer to remain here instead, for the duration of the battle. Eddaru and Gendrik can take turrets A and B. I'll do battery command. If you think you can put up with us, Sir,' Aldrem said.

'What, and endorse your brand of vigilante justice?' Dordd asked, absurdly pleased despite himself. 'You really think that little of the gun teams?'

'We've identified those who do have some talent, and managed to bring it on - a bit. They're better than they were, but not good enough to throw into a cauldron like this is going to be,' Aldrem stated.

Dordd was still thinking about it when there was another beeping at the door. 'That'll be Commander Falldess come to object to the first cut of the people I plan to transfer to her,' Dordd decided, thinking out loud. 'Enter.'

The door opened, and it was indeed Comander Falldess, brandishing a sheaf of hardcopy and looking as if she had half a mind to assault Dordd with it; the beeping kept going, and Aldrem realised it was his comlink.

'Ah, dreck, I set up an automatic alarm, that's the boobytraps going off,' Aldrem said. 'If you'll excuse me, Sir, Ma'am-' and he ducked out the door, heading for the main turret complex, blaster drawn.

'What in Sheol was that all about?' Falldess asked, to Dordd.

'More fodder for the court of inquiry.' Dordd sighed. 'I can guess why you're here. Shall I save time by showing you the records of some of the people I didn't transfer to you?' he said, and handed her Aldrem's datapad.

Subsector Command Base was a shambles; it looked as if it been designed for grandeur, but gone so far over budget they hadn't had a chance to add all the fancy bits.

The largest ship on station, when the detachment got there, was a Carrack; no match for a pair of Fulgurs, in and of itself, but the fixed defences - they would be a different story. So, limited shooting. Hopefully.

The bridge module of the customs corvette was small, not much bigger than a shuttle's. Helm control was more like a fighter, in fact - yoke rather than vector panels, throttle rather than power grid. Then flight engineer, two gunnery control stations, in Y-shape behind the pilot. Row of three consoles on the port of the aft end of the module, electronics; one conventional scan, one defensive, one customs analytic scanners and comms.  
Command chair in the middle, slightly raised, and to starboard a two seat holopanel bay for observers or senior agents along for the ride.

Rontaine preferred to con her ship from the observer's bay, more and better organised information flow, but it was full of cyborg. Space Major Overgaard was in there, apparently playing with one of the monitors; she had to ask.  
'What are you doing?'

'Testing the limits of my perception,' Overgaard said, in a reasonable facsimile of his own voice.

He had been sealed into life-support armour that was tied in to a set of replacement parts. The rebels had thrown him into a disintegrator booth set on 'slow burn', and he had.  
It was all surface damage, but it was most of his surface that had been damaged. Eyes, ears and throat gone, skin totally, a lot of flesh and muscle, only really core organs and skeleton left. By weight, he had actually been about sixty percent of a man, but it was discount day in medlab and they had decided to rebuild him anyway. Reinforced skeleton, cybermuscles, new sense organs, exoskeleton.

'Don't damage the monitor., Rontaine said, in a break-it-and-you-bought-it tone.

'Can it do infra-red?' the cyborg asked. 'I want it to show one pixel at a time, very nearly black, faintly coloured, to explore the limits of my discrimination. Can it do that?'

'It can give me a better tactical picture, which I need and you don't. Move,' she snapped at him. Overgaard shuffled over to leave one of the seats free.

'I am in charge of this part of the operation, and I expect to be obeyed,' Rontaine said, in cut-glass, received pronunciation tones.

'Expect away; we're theoretically equal in rank,' Overgaard said.

'That pilot was right, we need decimal points,' Rontaine grumbled. 'What's your seniority, your time in service?'

'In a service technically superior to the customs, that would be? In any case, I think Commander Sarlatt of the Starfleet might have an opinion on the subject.'

'What are you doing here, anyway? You're only just out of surgery,' she asked.

'I think they're trying to make me feel useful,' Overgaard stated, and flipped a switch on the console bringing up the scan picture. Approaching deorbit and insertion point.

The plan was that the two Fulgur and three of the corvettes would remain in orbit, three of the corvettes would descend to the base, but only Rontaine's would actually land, the other two remaining in close support. The scout team and the boarding platoon from Black Prince, backed by the customs boarding team, would go in and do the arrest/abduction, using the security ID's and personnel who looked vaguely appropriate.  
It was actually pretty much a classic Rebel type plan, relying on bluff and the sound of authority, misdirection and improvisation.

Charge Chief Derajivik was paying the part of the older agent, with junior lieutenant - 'apprentice' - Kittrich the brash young ISB officer. He had been told that he was being watched for this one, and to treat the older enlisted man with respect. Or at least fake it convincingly. Storm in, bang on tables, shout at them, cow them with your fervour and zeal for the New Order, and generally behave like complete gits, was the instruction they had been given.

It was supposed to be two standard garrison base towers linked together, and at the core it was, but someone had been ambitious, and someone else, lots of someones probably in the ferrocrete and duraplast industries, had profited by that.

The surrounding facilities had been developed outwards into an overgrown grey abscess. It was so clearly intended as a Major Fleet Base (™) that it actually achieved self-parody. Docking slips and barracks, maintenance sheds and workshops, hardstandings for small craft, slideways for repulsorless emergency landings, and the passenger and freight magways to serve it all.  
Then the defence installations, superhardened blister housings for theatre shields with valves for emitter antennae, closed, empty sockets for planetary ion cannon, shock pads for superheavy turbolasers, long rows and scattered clusters of conventional light and medium turbolasers - most of them empty, and so were the bays. Some of them had servicing and support machinery, but for the most part, bare ferrocrete and duracrete. A grey-brown blot on the planet, horizon to horizon of nothing interesting to see.

'Where do you intend to set down?' Overgaard asked.

'The key words for this operation were brash and bold, were they not? We have the same rough-field capability as the smugglers and pirates we chase, or better, so I was thinking, on that path in front of the main entrance to the staff tower,' Rontaine said.

'Avoiding the main docks entirely?' Derajivik said. 'Just what the ISB would do.'

The obvious comment about woman drivers - two hundred square kilometres of landing field and you still end up on the pavement - occurred to Overgaard, but he had already come far too close to death to think it worth saying.

'Approach Control, this is CN27AJ19, the Silent Bugler, calling for landing clearance., Rontaine said, in a tone that was not at all a request.

The flight controller tried to stall. 'Silent Bugler, this is a military facility, and you do not have access.'

'Approach Control, can you read? Reconfirm our beacon, this is Security business.'

There was a long pause. 'Take her down,' Rontaine ordered, and the three customs ships nosed down into the atmosphere, direct powered re-entries spiralling in on the base; the Carrack guard-ship moved to intercept, but had weapons locked onto it by both Fulgur. The wide V of customs corvettes powered their way in, leaving scorching ion trails and cones of seared air behind them, shields glittering under the strain of pounding through the atmosphere.

'Customs Corvette, you do not have approach authorisation,' ground control screamed at them.

'Which is your fault for being too slow to acknowledge it,' Rontaine snapped at him. 'Is there someone else there who can take over for you, considering that you're now under arrest?' she added, instructing helm to aim fore the flowerbed just outside the command centre.

There was a short pause, then, 'This is Lieutenant Aryat, duty watch officer. Have you just tried to arrest one of my controllers over the com unit?'

'I have just informed your man that he is impeding an Imperial Security Bureau investigation, which we have been assigned to assist. He has been told to consider himself under arrest, and we will be by to collect him subsequent to the main purpose. Would you like to join him?' Rontaine said, pivoting the Silent Bugler on repulsors so they came in stern first.

'Eris, is that you?' the duty controller asked.

She had no idea who he was. Aryat? Same time at the academy? Where had he been in the class rankings? 'I don't remember you.'

'I was number 1,371,' Aryat admitted.

'Small wonder I don't remember,' Rontaine said, cuttingly. 'Are you seriously intending to get in my way?'

'This is legitimate? Not just some demented stunt?' he asked.

'Considering the amount of trouble I'd just have landed myself in otherwise? Of course it's legitimate,' she said, contempt evident.

'Well, it's just that this isn't something I'd put past that maniac who came in from the Regional Support Group.'

Just as well they weren't on vid too, Rontaine thought.

Silent Bugler made ground, stern on-engine vents pointing directly down the accessway to the garrison tower and well within the small theatre shield. Not a friendly gesture, considering a full power take-off would turn the place into an oven.

'Go,' she ordered, and Overgaard, Derajivik and Kittrich moved off the bridge, down and out the boarding ramp, Team Blue-6 (more conservatively armoured than their rivals in team-17), the boarding platoon and the customs troops, equal in strength. They were in commercial standard blast vests and helmets, using straight E-11s without the squad support weaponry, mostly retired soldiers. Their normal job was search and seizure, and they deserved more respect than they usually got.

Overgaard looked like, and to some degree had been meant to look like, Lord Vader. That crack about a body double had been taken seriously. Not to the extent of impersonation - that would be suicidally dumb - but close enough to suggest the same sort of total, unsparing approach, give the impression of the ruthless machine.  
It seemed to be working. They simply stomped into the facility flashing ID, brushed past reception, stared down the naval troopers, said hi to the other stormtroopers stationed there, and got to the Admiral's office, against the outer walls of the building, to find it had been welded shut from the inside.

'Stand back-' Overgaard said, and was about to try to force the door when Derajivik said

'Wait. Trooper, your ion gun, give it to me.' Pointing to one of the boarding platoon. He took the gun, and shot the door repeatedly, blasting it until it started to throw off electric arcs.

'What was the point of that?' Overgaard asked.

'To short out or premature any boobytraps,' Derajivik said, handing back the ion gun and drawing his blaster.

'Does it work?' Kittrich asked.

'Not infallibly, no.'

Overgaard decided to take the chance anyway; he and the bulkiest stormtrooper charged the door, smashing into the plasteel - it was not a blast door, being shot with ion bolts had failed to improve it, and it gave, opening on to a corner office with a large charred patch on the open window and a bleeding man on the floor, in naval uniform. Not the admiral.

'What happened?' Derajivik shouted at the wounded man.

'Window…traitor, his aide and his secretary…jet packs.'

The scout team moved to the window and tried scanning for him, detector units, weapon sights and helmet sensors; Overgaard looked at the man on the floor. 'One question. How did you know he was a traitor?'

An incoherent gurgle for an answer. Overgaard picked him up and shook him. No sympathy. 'How. Did. You. Know?'

'You sure they didn't give you a copy of Vader's personality chip with that suit?' Derajivik asked. 'He's out of it, and most of us don't have jump packs.'

Good point. Call the ship, and after him!' Overgaard decided, and charged off heading for ground level.

'Go ahead, I'll catch you up,' one of the scouts said. They did, piling back down the stairwells.

On the way Kittrich asked, 'How does an old man like that know how to use a jet pack?'

'Soldiers don't get hatched-' Derajivik started to say, and half the stormtroopers turned round to glare at him. 'All right, front-line marines do, but vice-admirals, not usually. He must have been a young officer once, and he was probably a dangerous idiot then, too.'

'Could it be possible that his aide and his secretary kidnapped him?' Kittrich asked.

'Find out when we catch him.'

They made it out of the building, and then the scout they had left behind rappelled down the outer face of the tower to join them.

'He's on the run from Black Sun operatives,' the trooper reported. 'The assassin - disguised as a naval officer, the dying guy on the floor - broke in about ten minutes before we landed.'

'How do you know he was Black Sun?' Overgaard asked.

'The operative gave off their programmed identification pheromone,' the scout trooper said.

'Now I'm baffled,' Derajivik said. 'How do you find out what pheromones - no, wait, I don't want to know.'

'Pick him up by the scent glands, and squeeze,' the trooper deadpanned.

'Move,' Overgaard demanded, annoyed because he now had no sense of smell.

'Where? Every minute's head start gives them three kilometres' lead, even with crappy jet packs. In this, as long as they stay below line of sight in among the corridors and chambers, they could be half way to the horizon by now. There's no point giving chase on foot; we'll have to scan for them.'

'Just as well we came in a customs corvette then, isn't it?' Overgaard said, and called the Silent Bugler.

Two things occurred instantly to Rontaine; the admiral ran, so he thinks, or his staff think, he can't trust his own people to protect him - and he may be right.  
Second, if he gets killed - or even more embarrassingly, makes it to the squadron under his own power, we are not going to be Captain Lennart's favourite people.

'Stand by for both modes of take off. If I order ion drive, I want a fast ramp up to maximum power and a slow coupling to the ion stream - as much energy into the tower as is consistent with not being shot while escaping. If I order repulsors, that means a normal takeoff with no violence.' She gave the preparatory order.

Considering the timing - assassin made his attempt, ten minutes ago. They touched down - five minutes. They had been in a position to notice anyone jet-packing to freedom five minutes ago and had seen nothing.

She would shout at the ground team later. For the moment, consider this as a customs problem. Start with the fundamentals; a fleeing man. Not running from them, he hadn't had time to anticipate them.  
His goal, escape. Environment, industrial. Not actually all that complex, some holes and corners but not nearly as many as a comparable cityscape. Relatively easy to sweep, few - if, considering how deserted it was, any - friendlies. Good to evade pursuit in the short term, not in the long term.

If he had time to make preparations then somewhere in there, among the pits and hangars and bays and accessways, is an escape ship. If not - then, with three people, he will try to get to one of the grounded shuttles on the hardstanding.  
Pursuit on the ground would be difficult, verging on pointless. Recall them?

'Life form scan - bioelectric activity and body heat,' she ordered, and after a few seconds the data started to come in. Apart from the obvious - five signatures in one group, moving quickly - running pace - through the tunnels. Three in another, moving faster, but the five were ahead and moving to an intercept position. No, don't recall them. Where would that map to the surface?

'Ground force,' she used the ship's active optical scan - fancy term for searchlight - to highlight the nearest access shaft, 'move to intercept. We-'

A green flash, and the computed interception point lit up in a fireball as dumped energy flashed the duracrete to vapour. That was MTL fire, low power probably only for the sake of having to crash-start the reactor.

The scan system was howling, directing their attention upwards, where the Carrack was rolling to bring to bear for a second shot, and the two Fulgur were wasting no time opening fire on her. Lances of medium turbolaser fire pounded into the heavy corvette. She returned fire but the two fast frigates were too well shielded and too fast on their feet for it to matter. Sarlatt was, anyway. Yeklendim didn't really know how best to use his ship's speed, tried to manoeuvre so radically he took his own guns off target; he hadn't yet learned that fine art.

One was enough. The Carrack was putting most of its weapon power into holding them off, and missing; the shot it did spare to fire down at the base hit between their last aim point and the command tower. The base defences were coming on line; all those empty sockets - but enough had some weapon in them to make a difference.  
Assuming they knew who to fire at. Shot was going up indiscriminately at both Fulgur as well as the Carrack, and there was too much fire being thrown around to last long.

'Repulsors, get us moving.'

The Silent Bugler came off the dirt running, accelerating out to the crater, through the dust and debris. Most of the ground detachment had been knocked down, some flash-blinded by the hit; they picked themselves up, the wounded started to limp back towards the landing point - and saw the corvette go past overhead.

Time for that once the prime objective had been served. The corvette weaved and shimmered, flying evasive - the defence turbolasers on the main garrison tower took one shot at them that turned a monorail downrange into a smear of dust greying the sky, then ceased fire, uncertain who the enemy was.

Rontaine ordered her corvettes not to return fire and clarify the situation, then scanned downwards. Blast waves would have echoed through the underground tunnels; the three blips were still there - of course, being airborne, they could have ridden it out more effectively than the five on foot, who team Blue-6 were closing on.

There was a larger thermal signature, a small powerplant compatible with a reactor - whose? Remote startup, com ahead to droids? Could be. Classification - probably a shuttle.  
Move to intercept and - another bolt from the black as the Carrack tried again, aiming for the shuttle this time. Fortunately, they overdid it; the bolt punched deep, carrying too much power to shed its energy on contact. It burned its way down through ferrocrete into bedrock, drilled a deep, narrow cone and sent up a huge plume of vapourised matter, staining the sky again. Anyone without a breath mask, out in that - their lungs would need quarrying. Pick the detachment up now, before it got any worse? Or consider them expendable in the service of the Empire?

Await the next tactical step. Blue-6 had found their way beneath the surface; found their targets. Five people, all in powersuits - a form of mechanised armour that the Imperial military couldn't quite see the point of. They didn't make a man so much better armoured that he could afford to ignore blaster fire, never mind squad support repeater and sniper rifle bolts. They cost too much and needed too much looking after, and they gave a feeling of false confidence, made the wearer that much more liable to walk into traps.

It was a close-range ambush in an unlit corridor, both sides running on reflex without much time to plan. Between the T-21, two DLT-19s and the Plex, only two of the five even got their own shots off. A flare of lasers in the dark, and one miss, one trooper hit in the thigh; not dead, but that was someone else to carry. One of the wounded powersuited men tried to blow them all up.

Stupid to try to shoot the grenade out of his hand; instead, they blew his arm off at the shoulder and shot it again to push it away down the freight access corridor.

Two of them were still alive; quickly, shell them and take them along for interrogation.

Not before the Carrack registered the thermal detonator going off, and decided to try to eliminate both sides, but the base had partial shielding up now. That would make life difficult later, but it was useful now.

The turbolaser bolt splashed off the shields high in the atmosphere, highlighting the irregular, billowing, not yet firmly established dome of the theatre shield. It had already taken a fair battering, and now it attempted the only move left to it; kamikaze. It rolled over, nosed down, accelerated towards the base.

Boarding Platoon BD-32 had been lucky; they came across three blips in a tunnel. And six droids, which went some way towards an explanation of how a deskbound, middle-aged flag officer could manage a difficult and demanding run for his life.

Then things got very confusing, as the admiral's aide grabbed him and levelled a blaster pistol at his head.  
'Out of my way or the old man gets it,' the aide snarled; the confidential secretary shouted, 'He's trying to kidnap him! He's trying to defect-'and pointed her own gun at the aide, but got smashed in the ribs and knocked down by a backhanded blow from one of the droids.

Their attached medic took a chance. Hand signalled 'don't panic, I'm flanging it,' and took his helmet off, coughing a little in the dust.

'If you're Agent Springwall, then you're the man I need to talk to. Your escape ship's been destroyed, but we have an alternative.'

'You're…what's going on? You're stormtroopers.'

'Told you the disguise department had come through for us,' Surgeon-Lieutenant BE-4413 said to the rest of the platoon, hoping they were quick-witted enough to keep up. 'Looks that way, doesn't it? We're your exfiltration escort.'

'I'm not Springwall,' the aide said, and the fact that he didn't react more strongly condemned him. If he had been a legitimate Imperial, he would certainly not have been that blasé about it. Was he going to try and bluff his way out? Another crash and rumble from overhead - possibly just reflected recoil from one of the defence guns, possibly a hit, and more dust in the air.

'Operations screwed up and misfiled the codenames again? Why am I not surprised? I'll take her, follow us and move fast, we'll get you back to the Alliance.' Not a qualm. A few quivers, but it was fairly obvious, now, that the Admiral's aide was a rebel plant who had chosen this mad moment to grab him and try to make a home run.

He visibly thought, yes, that makes sense, things are pretty chaotic at the moment, it's possible they could have screwed the codenames up - but if operations is that far off balance, how did they manage to pull together this many fake stormtroopers?

It was almost as much a surprise to the surgeon-lieutenant when one of the squad snipers took the shot as it was to the aide. A DLT-20A, as he was glancing down at the surgeon-lieutenant examining the confidential secretary.

An unarmoured man - a kill, of course, clean through the head missing his jetpack. No boom today. Well, not one right here and now, just plenty of others.

BE-4413 threw himself over the admiral to cover him as the rest of the platoon hosed fire into the droids. Splinters everywhere as all six - two astromechs, a protocol and three combat droids - got shredded.

Flight under the dome of the shield was tricky, but not impossible. Repulsors were, being gravitic, inherently feeble. They were clean, and no more dangerous than anything else that gave a craft the opportunity to fly into buildings, but they drew a lot of power for relatively little momentum. A planetary-defensive dome shield could easily suck that away, leave a repulsor driven craft powerless and plummeting to earth. The corvettes were on ion drive, twitching on manoeuvre jets and exploding the air as they went, but they were still up. For now, anyway.

Corvette BD10NJ30 had landed to pick up the boarding platoon, Overgaard, Derajivik and Kittrich; just as well, that meant they were not directly present to shout at Rontaine. That left the stormtroopers to find their way back to the surface, signal for pickup and deliver their injured - the admiral seemed to have been drugged; he was semiconscious, drooling slightly. Fine state for an Imperial flag officer. On the other hand, it meant he wouldn't be able to interfere in operations. Good.

The slight technical hitch of being under a raised theatre shield - that was the second next problem on the list, after a plummeting Carrack corvette. If it did hit the shield, it carried enough mass-energy to detonate very convincingly. Referred energy would probably touch off the shield generator too. Not much fun to be standing next to, or flying around under.

Both Fulgur were rippling streams of fire into the maimed Carrack, trying to tear it apart before it completed the fall down from geosynch to the theatre shield.

Rontaine decided to do better than that. 'Provornyy, I have a plan. Cover us.' Touch down; drop the ramp - the stormtroopers triple-timed up it. Phase one complete and successful, with only a few small - all right, medium - holes in the landscape.  
Then off, and call up what of a map their sensors had been able to put together, and look for the shield generator.

'Silent Bugler, this is Provornyy,' Sarlatt's voice came over the audio channel. 'If your plan involves shooting out the shield and letting that thing power-dive into the base, then I'll blast you myself. That's not going to work.'

It would have been a useful way of covering their escape, and Rontaine was careful not to curse audibly.

Then she got the idea. 'Negative, Provornyy, but close. The shields are controlled, not manned directly. If we blast out the control relay the shields should go into stable shutdown; we can find a gap and the collapsing shield should still be enough to take the impact.'

'Too many shoulds in that plan,' Sarlatt stalled, trying to think of a better way. The carrack was a riddled wreck, no gun or engine function left, but the damned thing was refusing to explode. It as also on collision course for the base shields already.

'I'm under it, I'm willing to take the risk,' Rontaine said.

'You really think, in that concrete wilderness, they didn't bother to install land lines?' Sarlatt said.

Silent Bugler rolled inverted and fired a barrage down into the concrete. 'Past tense.'

The defence turrets came to life again and started shooting at them, only a couple of seconds sooner than they would anyway when all three corvettes under the shield banked to bring weapons to bear, and opened up on the comms grid on the spire of the command base.

Six twin mounts on each ship, each barrel spitting out five half-megaton bolts per second; the facility was armoured, but it never expected to be attacked from under the shield - relied on natural thermal conductivity to channel away the power. Not enough to shed ninety megatons a second. The upper levels of the tower vapourised; the layer immediately below melted and slumped down on the rest. The shield unit lost control and went into an autonomic failure mode, stable shutdown, collapsing slowly. Both Fulgur, firing on the lead ship's solution, aimed for what they hoped would turn out to be a weak point or they could at least turn into one.  
The three corvettes added what they could from beneath the shield; not helped when one of them, BD10NJ30, took a defence laser hit that blew its bridge module apart.

Overgaard and the rest of the boarding detachment were in the lower bay still, being checked out; they felt the thump, the strained screaming crackle of the shield generator overloading under a two hundred megaton hit, and the ship lose gravity and go ballistic. Oh crap, he thought, not again.

Who else was going to do something about it, the crew on the wrecked bridge module? Where else was there? The ship felt as if it was falling through treacle - an effect of the theatre shield, but the surface wasn't that far away.

Derajivik had had the sense to bring a breath mask. He was fine, and looking around for some way to make a difference.

'If you can get control of this thing transferred down to engineering, I can probably fly her from there,' Overgaard told him.

'Assuming they don't blast us again,' Derajivik said, but he was already moving.

They had maybe a minute, less if they were going to be shot sooner than that. That was no time to go through the proper security procedures. The personnel in there were customs service anyway; one ship technical officer, who was not going to get in the way of anyone who had a plan that might save them from death.

'No time to do this properly. I'll have to lobotomise it. Where's that zap gun? That circuit breaker, trip it - bridge that there. Isolate that console and bring up DRCS. And have a metre length of scable standing by.'

'What?' the technical officer asked, but the crew were jumping fast enough.

'All right, begin the verification procedure on that console and stand back,' Derajivik said; Overgaard did, then jumped out of the way as a stream of artificial lightning blasted into the main multifunction watch point Derajivik had pointed out.

'Right, the security system's in infinite regress, the ship's anybody's; you're setting output through the engines directly, give me a moment - right, now at least you can tell which way up is.' Derajivik had patched in sensor feed from one of the surviving turrets.

'It's that easy to blow out the main security overrides?' Overgaard said, not believing it.

'No, we've got maybe five minutes before they come online on the secondaries and shut you out.'

'Infinity isn't what it used to be,' Overgaard said, trying to remember how he was supposed to do this. Muscle memory was a bit harder when you didn't have your own muscles anymore.

Feed power to the engines; this was worse than tank treads, something like trying to play an organ with his feet - but it was that or crash and burn. Interesting that with so little biology left, the adrenalin still seemed to flow. Aim for the pale apple-green highlight on the sky, overlain on the flickering blue-purple shield dome itself shown by glittering flares where the dust brushed against it.

The ship kept sagging, falling off, being dragged down by the effects of the shield even as it failed; partial-atmospheric, then one third power, then full military power trying to balance the ship, very small by the standards of deep space war, on its tail and shove it up into the sky.

The third corvette, FL89IA12, got caught in a cage of turbolaser bolts - the misses splattering off the inside of the shield - and first a plume of molten metal and vapour, then the entire ship burnt, flaring out and leaving only a few solid fragments and molten droplets to rain down on the ferrocrete.

Then the Fulgurs' salvo hit and burst a gap in the shield. Rontaine's corvette thundered its way out of the gap on emergency overload power, scraping wingtips on the energy barrier as it billowed and fluctuated, caught between closing and unravelling entirely.

Overgaard almost wished he had some form of religion; something better to say than 'ohshitohshitohshit'- provided it wasn't a deathbed conversion.

The corvette spasmed as part of the energy field blew out, kicked and tumbled as it passed free of the shield- crunching sound as the compensators on board fought to keep up with the sudden surge, and in some place failed. Then the brilliant white light from behind them as the Carrack hit the shield, all of the remaining energy flowed into it and it shone briefly like a five million ton lightbulb filament. It burnt; and whoever was left under it was in no state to pursue.

Provornyy took BD10NJ30 in tow before her security programs recovered. The two frigates and now five corvettes manoeuvred for hyperspace entry.

Rontaine started to com Sarlatt on the Provornyy, then decided against it. She would only shout at him - about what a clusterkriff a quiet pickup job had turned out to be, about losing a ship and nearly losing another. If his temper would stand it, she doubted if hers would.

She had taken her ship into the fire, and brought it out again, but could not say the same for all her charges. All there was to do was hope that, whatever solution they could put together using that man, it would be worth the price.


	36. Chapter 36

The specific ship Falldess intended to kidnap was coming out of her biannual refit. She had chosen with a careful eye on the schedules. A ship which would have to be taken over entire from an active crew was out.  
And an eye to her own advancement. When all was said and done, Karu-class were destroyers. Light, but nonetheless.

'Karu' meant 'lady' - worthy, noblewoman - in one of the ancient dialects of Standard, she thought, and all the existing examples were named after women or the xenological equivalent who had made some difference to the sweep of galactic events. It actually seemed to be a back-handed insult, implying that the female, nurturer and egg-layer, of the species had made so little difference on average that they had to be left out of the ordinary sequence of ships like the Senator and Admiral class cruisers, and given special recognition.

Part of the New Order's non-huMan policy, probably.

Falldess didn't greatly care, was confident that she could take that and turn it against them. There was an additional insult that did concern her, though, hidden in the specifications - they were not fast ships. Fast was always better than slow, and destroyers above all else were supposed to be fast: witness the fate of the old Vic-I's. They had been designed to roughly destroyer size, for set piece battles of attrition, and were little use for much else.  
Not so much badly designed as well matched to an exacting, but narrow, range of circumstances, which being fit for that made them of relatively little use in peacekeeping, law-enforcement and hunter operations. Excellent deterrents, though. They had largely ended up sidelined on ceremonial and garrison detail.

Twenty-five hundred 'g' was reckoned average and adequate for a fighting ship, much below that and the relative advantage you would give away through being easily outmanoeuvred would make for a disproportionately easy kill, very much more and to build the ship to take that kind of stress meant sacrificing space and weight that would be better spent on firepower.

The Karu-class were average or a shade better, no brilliant performance there. What they did have was a solid main armament, twenty sixty-five teraton heavies in ten twin mounts. More than triple the firepower of her heavy frigate, even if less dexterity to wield it with.

That was in part a self-realisation, one that she hoped was wrong. In that clash with the rRasfenoni, she had fought with some footwork, but not much thought given to actual manoeuvre, not until it was too late. She hadn't used her ship's speed to the full, hadn't done enough to exploit position and agility. She might be better off with a slower, heavier hull.

She had written home about that; by now the entire planet would know, and they would be up in arms. That could make life interesting…but it would take her far too long to pick out and train enough of them to make a crew.

On exercise, she had had a chance to study her squadronmates; they had come nowhere close to filling out the full program, but what they had done had been revealing.

Dordd, the man whose ship she was currently on, was half out of his mind with frustration trying to make his useless crew perform; he was better at this than he realised. Cold and formal, precise and disciplined, but for all the difference between their personal styles it was clear that in his ship-handling he had been understudying Lennart, consciously or not.  
Provided he didn't let this experience drain his confidence and enthusiasm, he arguably had more of what the Starfleet wanted from an officer than Lennart did, or she herself.

However, making up the difference between her own crew and what she needed to run a Karu-class destroyer with his rejects - at first, she had been reluctantly accepting, then when she had seen the quality of the personnel he had intended to palm off on her, furious.

When she had the fuller picture of what the quality of his crew was like, she had actually felt rather sorry for him.

Then she had got around to asking why. Captain of the Line Lennart was trying to get a two-for-one; relieve some of the pressure on his own former exec, and hand those pretend excuses for spacemen over to someone who he thought could deal with them. He knew her background, knew that she had successfully dealt with worse; that he still trusted her after she had put her ship too far in harm's way was interesting.

Considering the almost absurdly close relations he seemed to have with his crew, he didn't strike her as indifferent to casualties. Hardened, used to dealing in the marketplace of death? Valued his people all the more for that they might not be around forever?

Either way, it was his word that had permitted - no, sponsored - this mad enterprise.

They had not seen him at his best, she knew, because every exercise, he and his ship were holding back, shaping the battle in order to give the other ships a chance to show - and sharpen - what they could do. Even only giving, say, eighty percent, he was a magician. The way that huge, mottled ship danced and twisted like a starfighter, weaving and gliding through the fire, between the shots of a salvo it seemed, moving at angles you would swear would make it impossible for her to keep her main battery on target- but somehow did.

The crew, though - did he achieve that despite or because of them? Any community that size would inevitably contain a proportion of lunatics, idiots and failures. How did it really work? She would have liked to spend a few days on board Black Prince, just to get the measure of it, the method behind the magic that turned madmen like that Lieutenant and his team into useful, no, exceptional spacers. Dordd probably knew some of the tricks, but in this crowd?

He hadn't even given her the worst. Dividing Dynamic's crew into blocks of two thousand, the bottom group he intended to beach outright, and most of them would be handed dishonourable discharges along the way and told it was that or a blaster bolt.  
The second worst lot, he intended to beach 'detached pending reassignment', which meant they could stay there until they rotted.  
The third worst he proposed to transfer to her, men who might just have some possibility of improvement but were unlikely to demonstrate it in an environment as bad as Dynamic's.  
Dordd proposed to take his ship into combat with a little more than half her nominal crew, and actually felt very much better for it.

There was nowhere where she could get all her existing crew together with the new draft to address them all, although she did have office and computer space to work out a watch and quarters bill.  
A few of the wounded had recovered in time, although having to leave a detail behind to look after Tarazed Meridian and continue repairs balanced that out.

It pretty much balanced out, except for one thing - she didn't have to trust any of the transferees in positions of responsibility, because so few of them were rated for any. There was hardly a rank stripe among them, and even fewer good conduct badges.  
He could have done a lot worse, she realised; transferred skilled, experienced men from her crew to his, or unloaded some of his very worst on her. And he had been tempted to.

What she had her own little shoulder devil whispering in her ear about was to try to poach Lieutenant Aldrem and his team, by offering him the gunnery officer's slot on Hialaya Karu. Unfortunately, Dordd seemed to have thought of it first, and passed on to her those of his own team disgruntled by the change, including most of his own fire direction team.

The only way she could get this lot together, given Dynamic's status as a fast interceptor destroyer without troop and flight bays, would be to assemble them in spacesuits on the ship's outer hull. Actually, that might not be a bad idea. Anyone who couldn't manage their suit well enough to not drift off or decompress was summarily dismissed the service.

Actually, Dordd - and Lennart - might approve. Consider it plan B. For the moment, com her people and tell them to rouse out the transferees and herd them towards the boarding locks.

Stormtroopers. There was one possible solution to the problem, and also a problem in itself - her frigate had one batallion of troopers, and four, after the loss of one flight bay three, squadrons. The Karu-class had the same fighter-light, troop heavy intervention outfit as the Victories, two squadrons and two regiments. The ground crew and pilots were with her, but whether, and what, they would find to fly, she didn't know. She did hope the ship's stormtrooper complement was on board, or at least standing by.

Hialaya Karu was just finishing refit and was ready to be handed back from dockyard hands to her crew, which seemed to be he perfect time to yoink a ship. There were other ships in the sector she could have opted for, but none for which the timing was so perfect. She did have to wonder if Kor Alric was aware that Lennart had forged his signature on the ops order.

Emergence, and it was obvious that the yard had no idea that they were coming. A waste of a deepdock, mooring it in parking orbit around a planet. In addition to being able to move to where the problem was, they were also supposed to be elusive targets. When something that fragile and that valuable was planted in place, it certainly should have been better defended, but there was almost nothing, only a Golan-II StarGun.

At least the planet was inhabitable, which was good. Somewhere to ditch the incorrigibles.

Dordd did not want to leave his own bridge - he needed the system and the monitors to remain in control of the situation, suspected he wouldn't trust the crew unless he could keep an eye on them. He brought the destroyer in - accurately but painfully slowly - so it was Falldess who got the fun job of telling the commander of Hialaya Karu that she was here to steal his ship.

He was in a borrowed office on the deepdock skeleton that had already been more or less cleared, ready to move back on board: a sharp-nosed, middle aged man, older than she was, and wary of her. 'Commander Falldess? The dock told me you were coming, but I don't understand why. Official observer?'

'Commander Carcovaan,' she acknowledged him. How to do this? Ease and ooze him out, break it gently, or brisk and brash?  
'Your ship has been reassigned,' she started. Perhaps it was best to be brutally cheerful, it's all in the game and you just lost this round, just the way of the service.

'Good,' he said, tragically mistaken. 'Just as real things were starting to happen, finally a chance to-'

She cut him off. 'The ship Hialaya Karu has been reassigned, without her crew.' Watching his face fall, she decided 'hard-nosed bitch' might be the right way to go about this after all.

'What?' he spluttered. 'But…she's my ship, my command, who? Who's doing this to me?' Stunned shock, almost bereavement.

Operational Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod,' Falldess said.

'I'll…I'll appeal. I'll contact 851 and have the decision reversed,' he said, and from his expression he knew he was grasping at straws.

'The timing works against you. Region's unlikely to have time to hear your appeal until after Hialaya Karu deploys,' she said, trying to look ruthless, and did not entirely succeed when he said,

'Some of my crew have followed me from ship to ship, commission to commission; I finally get a chance to make a name for myself, something I can use to push them on, and it gets taken away from me?'

'That is the way it is,' she acknowledged.  
What should a heartless cow think at this point? 'How long have you had Hialaya Karu?' she asked him.

'Year and a half, exactly, in five days time,' he said.

'Was it impossible for you to make an opportunity for yourself in a year and a half?' she said, stingingly.

'It's difficult to hunt things that aren't officially there,' he snapped back at her.

'I managed it,' she said.

'You?' he said. 'You're going to be taking over my ship?'

'In ten years of close and distant escort, I managed four convoy actions, with a total bag of two Corellian, a Sienar and an old Kuat corvette, and a mutual on a renegade Strike Cruiser - he managed to pound my Carrack beyond repair, but I did the same for him.'

'Oh, come on - a fleet unit, a light destroyer kept on a short rein with virtually no freedom of movement, how was I supposed to find anything for my people to do? This is the chance, this is the golden opportunity I have waited my entire career for, and you're trying to take it away from me,' he said, finding a vein of anger.

'Don't you think there was a reason you weren't chosen for secondment to the pursuit squadron? Chances are not something you find, they are something you carve out, and you didn't try hard enough,' she snarled at him.

They were both standing now, glaring at each other; she seriously wondered if he was going to haul off and hit her. If the circumstances had been reversed, she would have been hard put not to.  
She threw the data on the desk in front of him, and announced 'My letter of authority.'

That set it to display the authorisation, and he picked it up and read it - she could tell exactly when he got to the signature. He went visibly paler, slumped back into his chair and seemed to shrink slightly.  
'That's it,' he said, broken-sounding, anger dissolved on a wave of hopelessness. 'End of a career, end of the dream. An agent of the privy council-what does he have against me?'

'Probably nothing personal, but one of the privileges of that rank is that they don't need reasons. You feel bad now? Think carefully - if you still do have anything worth living for, don't challenge him on it,' she advised him.

'Why me?' he said, still too depressed to try to be professional about it.

'You were unlucky enough to have a decent sized ship coming out of refit at exactly the time when I happened to need one. Look, I'm from Bya Amadi. A thousand years ago, someone tried to burn my home world with high speed kinetic missiles.  
'We finally found the beings responsible; actually, I found them. There is no way I am going to be left out of that battle, no matter what I have to do or who I have to step on to be there, and Kor Alric respects vengeance as a motive. Enough to make me distinctly worried, actually, but this is the way it's going to be,' she said.  
She paused for a moment, then, 'Do you want me to inform them?'

He stood up, ten years older than he had been that morning. 'No. No, I'll do it. I'll break the bad news.'

'I'll have your effects moved dockside,' she said, turning to go.

'You-' he hesitated. 'You will bring Hialaya Karu back in one piece?'

'Considering what the pursuit squadron's going up against, I wouldn't base your hopes on it,' she said.

Two hours later, the old crew were on board the dock, the new crew had moved in and Hialaya Karu disengaged from the dock, and "hoisted the pennant" - changed her transponder beacon to the tactical number 851-Yod-4-A.

'Any problems?' Dordd signalled across.

What to say? Did it matter? 'No, no problems. We were lucky; full stormtrooper complement, squadron of /ln and a squadron of Bombers.' And someone else's fortune stolen, but that was not his or her problem, now.

'Good,' Dordd said, so non-committally that she couldn't decide if he knew what had happened or not. 'We have three hours to put that ship through its paces, shake your crew down and make sure everything works as it's supposed to, then we proceed to rendezvous off Ord Corban to join the rest of the squadron. There is a target appreciation, but no formal battle plan - I believe Captain Lennart intends to fight an open, manoeuvring battle. The one thing I am sure of is that it is going to be a bloody day.'

Two fleet tankers had arrived at the lagrange point, and one commercial transport full of ferrocrete mix. Which was all well and good, as long as nobody got confused and pumped their fuel tanks full of cement.

Ten thousand seconds, that was all it took to burn an Imperator's fuel toruses dry. Black Prince had been modified in this, as in so many other things, but the installation of additional torii hadn't kept up with the increased power output.

On watch, managing the docking and transfer procedure, one of the junior officers from the navigation division. On call, Brenn. In the day cabin, don't call me unless the sky starts showing cracks, the captain getting some much needed rest.

In all cases, the more manoeuvrable ship moved to link up with the less manoeuvrable. So the tankers remained on station, and the warships moved to meet them. All the other ships of the squadron had more thrust than the fleet auxiliaries; they would all line up, one behind the other - not directly, of course.  
Plug in, open the locks, cycle the hypermatter from the tanker to the destroyer, convince them that yes, they really did need that much. One tanker would be drained dry here and released to local control again, the other would accompany the squadron to the rendezvous point and top off Dynamic and Hialaya Karu.

The absence of any spoiling attack on the tankers was a good sign; it probably meant that the rebels were convinced that the forces of the Empire believed them to be long gone, or at least convinced enough to take the risk of hanging around a little longer, and making a planned withdrawal with as much machinery as possible.  
Accidents and cockups, they were the problem now, for at least the next hour. The vibe had gone through the squadron, but somehow the tension had carried - there had been individual actions, exercise and preparation, but this was it. Everyone was keyed up, and right now would be just the time for someone to make a mistake.

Brenn was watching the rest of the squadron shuffle into an efficient stepped column, out of each other's ion flares, waiting for that mistake. Trying to catch it in time to do something about it.

They had tried not to select fools from the sector group, and had evidently not been entirely successful - there had been no time to replace Subtractor, and Guillemot's new captain was still an unknown quantity. Their replacement turret was a botch job, the best that could be done in the time but likely to fail under stress.

Voracious' crew was a problem. However high the individual standard was, they were not yet a team.  
They were in line immediately behind Black Prince, because they would need time to separate out the fuel issued to them to the storage cell farm serving the flight line. Black Prince was first because she had most to take on, and then she could stand by and monitor the others, and use her tractor beams in case of that accident.

Brenn hoped Voracious' air group were putting in as much time as possible on their sims. They hadn't had a chance to exercise with the wing in its current composition at all.

Fortunately - or unfortunately - most of the requisitions to the sector group had gone through, with no more then the expected proportion of bureaucratic bungling.

Why? Surely the criminals in sector group would try to cross them up? Only two alternatives: either there were enough loyal men in the sector to obey the orders they received, or, in some more subtle way than a complete stonewall, they had set a trap.  
Both tankers had been scanned to within an inch of their lives, looking for boobytraps or armed self destruct devices or any other explosive little present; the slicing team were working through their computers now, and they would dock once they were convinced there were no nasty surprises waiting there, either.

Amazing how well briefed the journalists were. Slightly less amazing than how amenable they were to discipline.

In theory, they should be rushing around, shoving lenses in people's faces, ignoring security, disrupting routine, being obnoxious, pushy and deceitful and generally doing whatever it took to get the story. A stormtrooper battle group put a significant crimp in their normal routine. Probably the only force that could.

Aleph-3's being appointed assistant press officer - Cat Herder In Chief as she put it - was another minor blessing. It kept her out of the skipper's hair for a while.

There were onboard romances, even thought there weren't really supposed to be. Prejudicial to good order. They never escaped notice, either; something would always be brought to official attention - apart from anything else out of sheer jealousy.  
Officially, it was completely forbidden. On a small ship with a permanent base, convoy escort work and defence orbit, it was possible to have a home life, close enough to go home often enough to keep a partnership or a formal marriage alive.

Most ships weren't so lucky, and the divorce and separation rate for long haul patrol ships within a sector group was over sixty percent. For regional and strategic forces, which could be posted from one side of the galaxy to another at a moment's notice, ninety percent.  
Small wonder that the men and women on board ship sometimes turned to each other. That usually made things worse. It put additional stress on the couple trying to make a home they shared with thirty-seven thousand other people, and they couldn't exactly move to a better neighbourhood. Most pairings - or, to be open minded, triplings and quadruplings - would break up under the stress of managing a relationship and doing their duty at the same time. One night stands and three day wonders weren't the answer either, because the misery, bad temper and occasional acts of stupidity caused by relationships breaking up were at least as much a problem.

Lennart did occasionally turn a blind eye when he thought that a particular arrangement was going to work out. Witness Aldrem who had, when the business was boiled down to its essentials, kidnapped a local woman and brought her back with him on a hijacked starship, and been rewarded for it by promotion to the officer class.  
All right, that one was an exception. Still, the skipper seemed to enjoy making exceptions.

What most spacemen did, most spacewomen too, was have fun in port whenever they got the chance, and hold back the nesting instinct until their hitch was up and they could afford to settle down. Some of them never would; some would never leave the service, and some would lose the plot when released back to civil life. Brenn was nine years younger than his commanding officer, had been a child during, and mesmerised by the news of, the clone wars - the main reason he had joined the Starfleet, actually. Somehow, he had found himself staying in, and enjoying it.

Now, he was the captain's de facto left hand man and chief tactical deputy on one of the most active and most battle-honoured ships in the Starfleet. It was tiring and stressful, but there were millions of officers who would give at least a limb to be where he was. Maybe two.  
What would I do with a warehouse full of right arms? he wondered, not seriously. Enough time to make solid plans once the real problem was out of the way.

Lennart…he would stay in. If he had enough commitment to stay in the Starfleet after being bust down to lieutenant from full commander, and then claw his way back, then he wouldn't retire. So he had to take his social life where he could find it. A warrant officer of the stormtrooper corps, though, that was not normal by anyone's standards. She was a problem, and she added to his problems. She took time, and energy, away from him that the ship needed, and she was mired in this business of the Force. Which was interesting to watch, in a beside the hospital bed kind of way.

The captain didn't seem to have changed much, but anyone who knew him could see the stress that refusing to change was placing on him. She, and the Force she was pushing on him, was endangering the rest of them through that. There were other reasons to dislike her, he was forced to admit, jealousy being one of them. If he hadn't been capable of looking coldly at his own motives then putting them aside to do the job, he wouldn't have been here.

Desire for advancement was one of them. If this operation was successful - if they could manage to make it successful, there was that, but he could daydream about the other side of the winning line for a second or four, couldn't he? - then the sector group would probably be in for major reconstruction.  
A command of his own? Probable - assuming he chose to leave Region. Aiming slightly higher, he had some chance of inheriting the captain's chair on this ship, if Lennart ever did retire, or rather more likely was forced to hoist his flag.

Lennart knew he wanted that, and had no intention of retiring, so had tried to get him to accept command of a smaller ship now.

Behave, he told himself. Worrying about that now is like daydreaming of what a beautiful house it'll be once you glue the pile of bricks together. Assemble the future one brick at a time.

No-one had made any obvious mistakes - ships metres out of place, seconds late in getting there. That was just imprecise shiphandling, nerves, wouldn't be actively dangerous until their turn to dock, well within tractor tolerance anyway.

'Commander?' One of the oldest standing jokes in the Imperial fleet, a Voice from the Pit. Com-scan tech.

Brenn walked over to stand above the console.

'Tanker's as clean as can be expected; no boobytraps evident, physical or software, but as a fleet auxiliary that ship has various security measures, including a self destruct which could be kind of painful if it goes off while we're attached. Disable it?'

'Any sign that their IFF system considers us hostile?' Brenn asked.

'No, everything's clean there, but there's a manual override and we can't scan for crew intention. Not through hull metal, anyway,' the comtech advised.

'You can scan for hotel systems power loading, though,' Brenn said, meaning - do it. He was thinking of the Carrack over subsector command; subsequent analysis had shown that it had a skeleton crew on board, had been commanded by a small group of do-or-die fanatics in charge of a horde of droids.

'Slightly lean manned, ninety percent of complement,' the tech reported. 'Do you want us to do that hack, Sir?'

'Do it quietly, so they don't realise we don't trust them,' Brenn said.

'Can do, Sir,' the tech said, nodded to two of his trickmates.

'Ah…dreck. Commander, you may want to see this. IntSec issue,' Another voice from the other side of the pit.

Brenn moved over to that console, looked pointedly at the technician. 'Monitoring our systems, Sir, making sure they're not doing the same to us. Someone accessed Armoury Complex C1*4 twenty seconds ago, checked out a flamethrower and a heavy thermal detonator with the executive officer's access code.'

A heavy thermal detonator was the kind they used to kneecap AT-ATs. Wouldn't go through an armoured deck with the tensors up, but it surely would make a mess of the compartment it was initiated in.

Right now, Brenn wouldn't trust Mirhak-Ghulej with anything more dangerous than a rubber duck.

Complex C-1-star-4 wasn't a Legion facility, it was for crew use in the case of emergency, for defence against boarders and the like. There should have been a trooper detachment to monitor and secure - of course, they would have had to step aside for him.

Not being psychologically able to refuse orders and doubt the judgement of their superiors could be a real problem, even superiors that were known to be slightly mentally disturbed. But not carried on the books as such, not officially, so they had defaulted to that.

Now he had an area-effect, close quarters weapon, and a bomb. That choice in itself was a pretty good pointer to his intentions. Did the legion include such a thing as a hostage negotiation team? Destabilisation was probably the closest, and somehow he doubted that it was entirely appropriate. Mirhak-Ghulej already had been, that was why he was going to do something this stupid. Someone had to go and talk him down.

Why? Brenn asked himself. Why not let him go and blow himself up, and hopefully take out their second biggest problem in doing so? Because he was part of the team? In all honesty, no. Never was, never really had been, except in the warped sense that they needed someone within the fold, someone at arms' length to hate.

It probably wasn't going to work, that was one reason. Adannan would have to be stunningly arrogant not to already be on guard. Not giving him the satisfaction of killing a man, that was what it came down to.

Brenn was just trying to add up whether he could leave the refuelling operation in the hands of a senior lieutenant, when the day cabin door slid open.

Captain Lennart, uniform tunic flapping open over a dark grey undershirt, baggy pyjama pants and fluffy bunny slippers. He looked half-slept and unshaven, no surprise really because he was.

'Skipper, you had the Force a long time ago, either that or you have the entire ship wired for sound,' Brenn said.

'Just applied common sense. Nothing's happening, the rhythm is wrong,' Lennart said, waving an arm at the holodisplay showing the tanker, 'so I come and find you standing over an internal network station. Either we've been sliced or somebody's done something stupid. You're having to wonder what to do about it, so that makes it the latter. What happened?'

Brenn hesitated again, not wanting to say it out loud - knowing that if he did, it would become grade A prime triple distilled scuttlebutt within seconds. Lennart looked too tired to play games, though.

'It's Commander Mirhak-Ghulej. He's just signed out a flamethrower and a demolitions detonator.'

'Dreck,' Lennart said, and headed for the turbolift complex.

'Skipper, let someone else go and try to reason with him,' Brenn said. 'At least, have him shot and put out of his misery.'

'Another job I can't send anyone else to do. My fault anyway, I broke him,' Lennart said.

'You haven't told me what the smenge we're supposed to be doing. I don't know what the battle plan is. And he does have a bomb.'

'The documents are on file - and he may have a thermal detonator, but I have fuzzy feet,' Lennart said, glancing down.

'If he's reached the stage of contemplating murder-suicide, he's too far gone for surrealism,' Brenn cautioned. 'He never did have much of a sense of humour, anyway.'

'They're not for his benefit, they're for mine. Roust out, hmm, DF34 and tell them to meet me outside the Imperial suite.'

The unit he had named was part of the headquarters element, second batallion repulsor regiment - scouts used to thinking on their feet, not particularly heavily armed, but for this they shouldn't need to be. They met him in the corridor below the imperial suite, just outside the turbolift; Lennart over-rode access to the level above. His renegade exec would have to get out here, and face - what? What was it he was really trying to do? Talk the man down, or talk him into going through with it?

There were emergency access stairwells at both ends of the short corridor, and the scout platoon took up positions covering them; eminently grenadeable, but there wasn't much room to use to avoid that.

The first unwelcome visitor came down from the level above. It was the masked Givin of Adannan's retinue, wearing a thing clamped on to his head that looked like a torture device, but was probably a camera. As well. The scout team had not been given orders to stop him, although it would have been their first choice. They pointed their guns at him, but there was a commotion at the other stairwell.

Lennart caught the flash of a camera lens. Dreck. Then the lift door opened.

Mirhak-Ghulej was wearing a bathrobe and a loincloth. He had put on weight - comfort eating, and a man in his broken-minded state needed a lot of comforting. He stared wildly about him as he came out of the lift. Not now, Lennart thought, trying to resist the urgent pressure of the Force. The light side was urging him to talk Mirhak-Ghulej down, the dark side to blast him where he stood.

Thinking of both sides as actual personifications made them easier to deal with. He told them to sort it out between themselves and turned to his executive officer.

'I was trying to dress down, but it seems as if you beat me to it. Nice day to take a bomb for a walk.' Going to have to do this with an audience, he thought. All three of me.

'Hmwhuhah! Place. Time. You should know better than that,' Mirhak-Ghulej said. He sounded three-quarters mad, but the look in his eye was steady enough.

'We spit on any rational concept of place, we stretch time to fit. Both are what little blobs of mush choose to make of them, and it isn't right.'

'Is this an answer, is this a solution? Doing something as incredibly disorderly as blowing yourself up?' Lennart probed. He had gone to see Adannan, that much he knew, but whatever had been said to him, he had gone away and brooded on it and turned into this.

'Order? Don't use that word again,' Mirhak-Ghulej said, more of a plea than a demand. 'Never use that word again. There are no bridges over the screaming vortex! It's nothing but a tissue paper veil.  
'What a joke to think that we could be stable in the madness and the lies. Nothing makes sense any more. It never had to, was never really supposed to. And I didn't know.' He showed no sign that he was aware of the minion, the film crew, and the stormtroopers.

'We tried to tell you often enough,' Lennart said, pitching his tone for calm assurance. 'The extreme disrespect many of the crew showed for your person and your views wasn't a hint? The example Gethrim and myself showed you gave nothing away?'

'Oh, those were kindly acts. They incarnated it all, helped me to take it personally and made me feel like a champion of good order and discipline. You used me to keep the illusion alive for everyone else,' he said, tone shifting to anger.

Was that thing armed? Lennart wondered. 'I hope you haven't lost it badly enough to think I shared that illusion.' Make it personal, he was thinking, engage with the bronze-faced madman. Let him turn on me, and if I can keep him talking, I can bring him down.

'You-you're the worst of the lot,' Mirhak-Ghulej said, leaning forward as if to peer at Lennart. 'The ambidextrous man, swearing to protect and defend the martyred innocents one minute, breaking bread with the murderers' guild the next.'

He would have shaken his finger at Lennart, if he hadn't been doing it with the hand that held the flamethrower.

Lennart didn't flinch. Mad dog, he was thinking, when dealing with a mad dog it is important not to show fear. Or, in this particular case, smugness.

'I can make some sense out of what you're saying, which under the circumstances worries me…care to talk about your latest meeting with the deputy poobah of the local guild chapter?'

'He showed me that-that I had been living a fraud of a life, in a cause which didn't really understand me at all. That there was a lie under all the truths. That I had been used and abused, and that I had helped break myself to the lies.'

'Most people do. It's common enough,' Lennart said.

'You mean what I'm doing fits a pattern?' Mirhak-Ghulej said, part of him pleased, part of him angry and the two falling out over it.

'Twenty-five thousand years?' Lennart said. 'How much time do you think they needed to work the patterns out? There are predictable rhythms in everything, contingencies and dependencies. There are patterns for how those patterns evolve, interact and change over time, patterns for how the patterns of change are expected to change - and so on ad absurdum.  
'What difference do you think that ought to make?' Lennart said calmly, asking him to think, which he would hopefully do out loud.

'I know what difference it makes,' Mirhak-Ghulej wailed. 'It means that men without principle can use a man, identify what I care about and play me off it like a stimulus response machine.'

'What makes him less predictable than you?' Lennart asked. A lot of things, actually, training, upbringing, way too many personal psychological kinks. But the principle was there. 'You can play them, push their buttons just as they do to you, and who thinks first and fastest - as the Ubiqtorate say, Who Analyses, Wins. What else did you think he was going to do?' Lennart asked.

He could probably save Mirhak-Ghulej, at the price of some of his self respect and sanity. Both of their sanities, actually.  
Using his former exec - no way anyone, even Lennart, could justify retaining him in that position now - as a kamikaze against Adannan probably wouldn't work, even though just maybe he might be able to swing it, afterwards.

'I thought he was an agent of the privy council,' Mirhak-Ghulej said, 'A being of order and discipline. I found a licensed pirate, a gargoyle, a man - if the term stretches -'

'It does,' Lennart interrupted, but Mirhak-Ghulej kept going.

'-who would patent a system for stealing red-hot stoves. Do you know how he plans to use you?'

'I have an idea,' Lennart said, thinking fast about how to phrase it. Would it serve to appear the kind of man who could pose a credible threat to Adannan, which meant being almost as cruel and devious? Was, for that matter, Kor Alric listening in himself? Almost certainly, at least by camera and probably by telepathy. Hmm.  
Another thing that it would be distinctly bad to say - provided he doesn't use you as a weapon against me. Thinking too hard on that issue might just convince Mirhak-Ghulej to let that bomb go after all.

Adannan would have a win-win set up here if he, Lennart, wasn't careful. By making me move to stop one of my own officers from blowing Alric up, Lennart thought, I'm catching the bullet for him, in effect.

If I have to have him killed, well, there it is. He's set up me murdering one of my own officers - what a breach of the sense of community that holds us together. If I manage to talk him down, then death might be just as certain, following prolonged legal dissection. An attempted assassination of a high official would have to go to court, probably with Adannan prosecuting.

Summary judgement wouldn't rub enough salt in the wound, this would be done with the full travesty of the law. Adannan could use his authority to declare himself a superior court, but Lennart didn't think he would. More fun this way. If they weren't trying a cloud of vapour, that was.

'I also have a plan to protect myself,' Lennart continued, 'that doesn't involve measures quite this drastic.' Which was a flat out lie, considering the fallback emergency plan of signalling Dynamic to open fire on the bridge tower.

'Something's wrong. Everything's wrong, but something is very wrong,' Mirhak-Ghulej said. 'You're not angry enough. Boom, and a big red smear all over your record. You're not taking this seriously.'

'I reckon you're just about angry enough at the universe for both of us,' Lennart said, quietly. 'My career's survived worse - and do you have any idea about the blast radius of that thing?' He decided to be flippant about it. 'If I do get vapourised I won't exactly be in shape to worry about it, so what the smenge.'

'You're just as bad,' Mirhak-Ghulej screamed. 'No respect for truth, stability, discipline. Neither do I anymore,' he said, peculiarly - he so desperately wanted to be wrong. 'It's all fakery, it's how they pirate us, steal us from our own selves.'

How much damage do I have to do to his self respect, Lennart wondered. A broken man with nothing left might just let that bomb go. As it possible to slingshot past this and build him back up again?

'You're really only just working this out? Only losing your political virginity now, of all times?' he said.

'Everyone else feels like this?' Mirhak-Ghulej said. 'Abandoned, betrayed, lied to?'

'The situation's the same,' Lennart admitted. 'How hard you take it depends on how much faith you had in your sociopolitical superiors to start with. You must have been much more confident in society than I ever was.'

'But…' Mirhak-Ghulej gestured upwards with the flamer. 'He doesn't shock you? You don't find him an abomination?'

'If I do, it's not for the same reasons. And do remember who Kor Alric works for.'

A straight warning not to commit lese-majeste would lead Mirhak-Ghulej into direct insult. Lennart let that go for the moment, but added 'And who you were supposed to be working for - which happens to be me.'

'You cast me out!' Mirhak-Ghulej shouted at him. 'You led me on and you cast me out.'

'I expected you to help my crew deal with the truth, not to ram the lie down their throats. You were committed, a true believer - that's why you had so far to fall,' Lennart said.

'I thought at first you were playing the game in your own way, dealing with the truth, paying society its due and taking what you could get, but then you made it spectacularly obvious that you weren't.' Why are you dealing with, why are you trying to save this ridiculously broken man? The Force whispered in his ear.  
Because he's my fault, at least in part. With more time, I could have fixed him. As it is, I wish the Force really was like duct tape. Or I could do projective telepathy well enough to tell Gethrim to get ready with the ray shields.

'This, though,' Lennart continued out loud, 'this is no solution, it's the end of all potential, forfeit of any chance to make good what you've lost and make sense of what happened.'

'I'm a lost cause,' Mirhak-Ghulej wailed. 'The jokes, the sneers, the slime, the hazing, an endless stream of little hateful things to mock a man who had nothing, only a con trick to live by. You kicked me when I was down, and I don't want to live anymore.'

He was perilously close to pushing the button, Lennart realised, within one or two twists of the knife of wiping himself out.

What effect would shooting a thermal detonator with a blaster have? Set to stun? DEMP weapon? Much easier to shoot the man. From the strictly naval point of view, it didn't really matter - he was unlikely to ever get it back together enough to be allowed to serve again, even if he wanted to.  
The part about the black mark on his record was true enough, though not of overriding importance right now. The fact that it probably wasn't going to work did. What the kriff kind of shape will he be in, even if I do pull him back from the brink? Lennart thought.

'Look. Vasimir. I suppose you could call me a chaotic constructionist. I believe in making and building, in creation and growth, and I've been exceptionally lucky to find and keep a job that lets me commit so much high-yield violence in a good cause. I don't want to let you make a nothing of yourself. I had you sidelined because I wanted you to change and grow - I thought that anybody in your position with your record had to be doing more than hanging on by his fingernails, I didn't realise how much support you needed. Neither did you.  
'He knows he got to you, he's waiting for this, and I think he's faster, and nastier, than you are. I don't think you can kill him faster than he can kill you. Let someone he isn't expecting, doing something he can't foresee and hasn't set up, take care of him. You might as well live for the time being.'

Mirhak-Ghulej seemed to be listening. Lennart continued, 'Come on. You've done enough, you've taken a stand, you've got this far. Let someone else help you and take it the rest of the way.'

This had not been a cry for help, he had intended to go through with it, but under the drained hope, not daring to express itself, that there might be a way back.

'You're serious? You promise?' Mirhak-Ghulej said. Was it possible he was faking it? Nobody could sound that much like a five year old boy and mean it, not unless - well, he was too far gone to fake it. Probably was that damaged. This is the tipping point, Lennart thought.

'Considering what I'm up against, considering what he did to you,' Lennart stopped himself before he could say 'Don't worry, I'll fix the bastard.' He could. Had to.  
Had every intention of doing so, for his own and the ship's reasons, but to say so out loud would constitute an open, public-record declaration of feud against his constitutional superior and a man of some potency in the Force. Suicidally dangerous.

On the other hand, to claim he couldn't do it - melting was not in the game plan, either.

Trying to talk to him at all was the high risk option, once begun no way back - this had to work. Make that promise and the response might just be, 'Let's go do it now.' Crap, I hated the dramatics society.

'What can I do? He has his authority to use as a weapon, legal power and the power of the dark side, and no remorse at all for the damage he does. What can I, what can any ordinary man do in the face of that?'

The Givin's face creased under the mask, as he realised that Lennart had accepted Adannan's challenge on Adannan's terms - it would take an extraordinary man, a wielder of the Force.

For Mirhak-Ghulej, the tone was pitched perfectly, one of baffled, helpless anger, pitch perfect brick wall at the end of the line, because his carved bronze face wrinkled up, and he started to cry.  
Lennart grabbed him and hugged him, as two of the scouts ran to snatch up the exec's weapons and take them away.

'I'll find a way,' Lennart whispered to him, and two more scouts came to take the shaking, drained body of the exec. 'Take Commander Mirhak-Ghulej down to medical, tell them I said they were to help him.'

Lennart was almost sure he heard one of the scouts mutter 'What, euthanasia?' under his helmet, but now that the crisis was past, he had to rein in the flow of anger that followed it. That Givin; how good he would look with that thing on his head smashed in, and twitching on the deck. I will not do it, Lennart told himself, I will not give him an excuse.

That and the thought occurred to him that Adannan had had the minion effectively staked out here, in order to give him an excuse, and he regarded his own people as sacrificable because he intended to replace them with better, chosen from his apprentice's ship's crew.

The journalists started towards him, but for once in their lives, self preservation over-rode the instinct to get the story at all costs. If they had tried shoving a microphone in his face at this point, he would have found out exactly what he could do with the dark side of the Force.

They kept the camera on him, but had the sense not to say a word.

On the main bridge and back in the captain's chair, in something more closely resembling uniform, Lennart first called up every display he could think of and sat drinking the information in.  
This is what I am, he thought self-consciously, repeating it like a mantra. A naval officer, not a psychiatrist, not a paralegal Force-fueled vigilante, not, I hope, a monster, just the commander of a starship about to commit to battle.

Fueling complete; one point four five billion tons on board. The other ships of the squadron, ready. Everyone knew what had happened, knew he did not want to talk about it.

'General announcement, all ships of the squadron;' the com team set it up. More than a few of them were in dress uniform. It was going to be a big day, one way or the other. Even Lennart, although he still had the fuzzy feet on.

'We have three, possibly four battles to fight. Our first target is Ord Corban. Long range scan indicates the rebels have taken the chance on a slow evacuation, taking as many machine tools as possible. This is what I wanted to happen.  
'Jump to a point off, bow-shock tactics, and RV with Dynamic and Hialaya Karu. Then Black Prince and the rest of the strike line, less Dynamic and Perseverance and plus Blackwood, will make a recon-in-force approach to the target. If we are lucky enough to catch them at anchor, so much the better, but I expect a double or triple layer vectored ambush, they have a base station there after all, and intend a two or three phase entry.'

'I have confidence in my own ship's ability to survive under fire, so Black Prince will enter first and relay navigation data back to the RV point. Structure works for them, chaos works for us. I want a running, moving battle - the planet won't go anywhere, so any damage doable to it in the initial stages is a bonus, but the prime target is rebel fleet assets. All the hyper capable fighters and small craft will be going in in the first wave also. Open formation, open order, commit all combat small craft on entry, stand ready to receive tactical direction from your line leaders and the Flag.  
'First nav point and codes of the day downloading to you now, so, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of the peace of the galaxy and the glory of the empire, let us exercise our vocation and commit to battle.'

Turning to his navigator, Lennart said, 'Let's go. No sense keeping destiny waiting.'


	37. Chapter 37

The jump to the rendesvous point went off without a hitch. After disengaging from the tanker, Black Prince had gone to battle stations essentially of the crew's own accord, and most of the rest of the squadron did so on arrival.

The course was a straightforward zigzag, to a light-year out and on the axis of rotation of the star, the system laid out in plan view below them. Dynamic and Hialaya Karu were there already, drifting and waiting. Lennart ordered the squadron to assemble on him, in the wave formation he had chosen.  
First wave: Black Prince and the fastest ships of the group, and their supraluminal small craft, shuttles and transports mainly, the shuttles with pivot and turret guns, the transports with ion guns and torpedoes. Voracious started loosing her complement of Avenger and Assault TIEs, and older types they had booster rings for, the Actis and Nimbus, to join them.

That should give us starfighter superiority from the start, and a decent antiship punch to follow that in, Lennart thought - that had been the point of the plan. After that, who? My working assumption is that they will be caught out initially but react quickly, and microjump or jump out and return, attempting to gain a killing position on Black Prince.  
The second wave exists to exploit that, jumping in to kill them while the flag leads them away. Most of the squadron should be second wave, but it was going to be a running, manoeuvring fight for the most part.

The ships that couldn't coordinate their actions well enough to perform effectively under those circumstances, or were physically incapable of the necessary acceleration, would have to form a third wave - jumping in when the fight had taken on more definite shape.

He com'd Falldess on the Karu-class destroyer. 'Any problems?'

'The, ah, the local crew were unwilling to part with her. I had to use Kor Alric's authority to pry her loose,' Falldess said.

'There's more to it than that, isn't there?' Lennart asked.

'Yes,' she admitted, wondering if she was going to make the situation worse for the local crew. 'Commander Carcovaan was very disturbed by the thought that he was going to miss his chance to make a name for himself and his crew.'

'Disturbed how?' Lennart asked.

'Initially, almost in tears.'

'If he took it that hard…' Lennart said disapprovingly, thinking Destiny, send me hard-nosed bastards who can carve their own way, whose hands I don't have to hold, because I don't know how much more of that I can do without snapping and ripping somebody's head off. Although, bearing Kor Alric in mind, not too many.

'At first, when it was just a shock. Then I thought he was going to murder me to get his ship back. When I showed him Kor Alric's authorisation, he sort of crumpled, but then dealt with it professionally enough,' Falldess said.

Carcovaan had been left out of the initial squadron lineup largely because of his ship. The slowest accelerating craft Lennart had been prepared to accept in the initial lineup had been the 2,680 'g' Demolishers. Karu class, although they had many other good qualities, were not fast. She and Dynamic would form the bulk of the third wave, Fist, Voracious and Perseverance the second.

The other reason was that Carcovaan had few negatives, but also few positives. He was average, maybe above average, but had never had, worse had never sought hard enough to find, the chance to distinguish himself. Maybe he would, if the chance managed to find him.

What else was there, in terms of unfinished business? Too many enemies - including the most personal of all, who mercifully had had the sense to keep out of the way. That was unusually tactful of Kor Alric, who must have been aware that the crew of the destroyer loathed him. Lennart was expecting a sly little probing call, another aggravation, which probably would have been enough to set him off.  
The timing was wrong, though. Right now, it would suit Adannan to have Lennart unbothered, and at peak efficiency to defeat the rebels and carve their way through to Ord Corban.

'Skipper? We have a problem. Kind of weird.' Cormall, who looked fantastically out of place in full dress uniform.

'Weird. Around here that could be anything, but - Nygma?' He was about due to cause trouble.

'I think so. Being as how we're dealing with a master of deception and confusion, I could be wrong,' Cormall said, but from his tone it was clear it was so unlikely it could only be the rogue analyst.

'Sir, I've been using all the run time the ship had to spare, I've got better tools to work with, I thought I had a break into one of his data-dump accounts and tried tracing back from there. I had the brute force to cut through a lot of the clever puzzles he left, but-'

'That's a lot of excuses for a mistake you haven't told me you've made yet,' Lennart interrupted.

'Sorry, Sir, but, have you ever walked into an invisible house of mirrors? There are multiple feeds out. Each of them with feedback, and carrying data close to the limit of the human brain to assimilate, so suddenly I have forty-plus primary targets. I don't understand how he can be in that many places at once. Either he's single-handedly invented a new stardrive with journey times in nanoseconds per light year, or-'

Both of them said at the same time, 'He's gone massively parallel.'

'Ah, dreck,' Cormall added.

'Contact them. Contact them all,' Lennart said.

The chief petty officer did; the holodisplay filled with changing mathematical symbols, a strange pseudo-equation of dancing randomised nearly-logic. All with little green hats.

'Doctor Nygma?' Lennart said, dreading the answer.

'Yes,' All of them said, in quadrodecaphonic sound.

'The conclusion you expect me to come to as a result of this display - you have, haven't you?'

All the mathematical symbols looked shiftily at each other. A lemma picked a fight with a theorem, and the set of all sets that include themselves decided to blackball one of its members, just to see what happened.

'Yes.' 'No.' 'Conceivably.' 'Indeterminately.' 'Stochastically.' 'Suppose that I are not confused…'

'Next question,' Lennart said, carrying straight on. 'Did you think this was actually necessary, or just too much fun not to do?'

Again a scattershot of random, nonsensical, head-bending answers, which Lennart guessed distilled down to, 'A bit of both.'

'You do realise,' Lennart said, and stopped himself before he could ask the open-ended question "what the consequences of this are going to be" the answer to which could have gone on forever, 'what you have to do now? Survive, and bear witness?'

'Some of us are not carnivorous. We want to marrow witness instead,' the one nearest the front said.

'Fine,' Lennart said, determinedly ignoring the discussion of the theory and iconography of the cybervegetable that started up in the lower half of the holotank. 'We found you, but…you know your own trade best, I'm sure. Good luck.'

He broke the connection.

'Kriff me sideways with a zombie rancor. How did that happen?' Cormall asked.

'I wouldn't say that in earshot of anyone from Engineering if I were you - and I should be asking you that anyway,' Lennart said. 'He must have created an emulation of his own mind, and spread it throughout the sector HoloNet. With all the classified data in his brain - Black Sun might not have the skill to track all of him down, but the Ubiqtorate are going to kill him. I hope we haven't just given memory room to one - or several - of him?'

'Sir, I don't think so, but I could be wrong,' Cormall said, honestly.

'Glorious. Well, don't let him, or them, interfere with ship systems.'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Cormall said, but Lennart's mind was already moving to the next problem. Something he had failed to do consciously and explicitly, worse, something he had been particularly insistent on in the exercises - enemy intentions analysis.

In the rebels' position, he would be sending out whatever he could spare to launch spoiling attacks, scattershot across the sector. There would be plenty of targets, too soft or too confused to resist effectively. Even strikes that failed would achieve something strategically, spreading confusion and helping to cover the evacuation.

The fact that they hadn't indicated that they were going down the other route, making one big fight out of it. That was why he had requested support from 851. They could do hunter operations throughout the sector, or reinforce the pursuit squadron at Ord Corban.

Most of the unplanned acquisitions, the remains of Third Superiority Fleet, would attack as part of wave three. HIMS Fist had the acceleration to form part of the first wave, but he wanted her as one of the key pieces of the second. The holes had been crudely plated over - the welding was still glowing hot, but the repair job should be robust enough to stand having a shield spread over it, hopefully. The other reason that with the loss of most of primary sensor function and thirty percent of the EW emitters, she was less fit to fight a high speed, long range running battle, so phase two it would be.

As an academy tutor, I would mark this plan down on several grounds, Lennart thought, one of them being violation of unit integrity. I had intended to work up to efficiency and deploy in that standard pattern formation, but now I'm winging it, he thought. With one more line and one more light destroyer than I had expected, so it's not all bad.

With a little bit of retroactive polish, this might almost look like I planned it.

Group Captain Vehrec was one of the last out of the old Venator's fighter complement, he was still trying to make sense of the deployment plan.  
Caliphant was with him on the bridge, and said, 'Well, you should be happy with the battle plan. Especially the bit that says "and then we make it up as we go along.'''

'Yes, it does,' Vehrec said, looking down at the datapad in hand.

'We were lucky in that last fight. We were just a big dumb ox, trying to squash the enemy with dead weight. The crew are happy about it, I'm happy about it, but we were slow and we fumbled a lot. I should be bouncing off the ceiling here; guns and glory, yee-hah, woohoo, all that, going around and telling everyone how wonderful they are. Instead-' Caliphant said.

'You're worrying too much. When the shot starts to fly, they'll shake out. They're a bit overconfident now, if you can calm them down without going too far the other way it would be good, but they'll do.'

'What I am concerned about,' Vehrec continued, 'is the booster rings.'

'The what? You're serious.'

'Of course. Look, we hyperspace in, eleven squadrons, and ditch six squadrons' worth of booster rings - they haven't been in production for fifteen years, there are damn few left to turn up. As soon as you come in in wave two, get the retrieval tugs and tenders out.'

'We're making a combat drop, we're going to be…oh. I see where you're coming from there. Right, can do,' Caliphant said. Worrying about an absurd little thing like that, at a time like that, would be a good way to get the crew indulging in some nice, comforting, stabilising, panic-preventing routine.

'Good,' was all Vehrec said. He was thinking, Antar Olleyri may have the rank, but I'll be the man on the spot.

With thirty-plus transports and as many again armed shuttles on top of the wing, that's upwards of a thousand antiship torpedoes, and the combined energy firepower alone reaches the low gigatons; hitting secondary targets is going to be fun.

Lineup complete, and move in from assembly area to the target.

The rebels could hardly fail to notice the shoal of hyperdrive signatures coming their way, but they could be prevented from doing so until it was too late.

Primary entry point was just above the ecliptic and to sunward, a quarter AU off the mainworld. One hundred and twenty-four light seconds - less time than it took to raise a shield.

Black Prince, the elements of the strike line committed and the shoal of fighters and armed transports emerged as planned, in a system full of energy and drive flares. The rebs were still here, and they were busy.

The Actis and Nimbus squadrons ditched their drive rings, fanned out, Black Prince went on to a standard shallow evasive weave while gunnery picked the first target of the day.

EW was already registering panic, confused crosstalk on rebel command wavebands; no time for code cracking yet, but traffic analysis indicated near panic. Possibly simulated, could have been an ambush - if it was, their own side were in ignorance of it.  
Too many lower echelon units trying to contact higher, too many people talking at once. It was chaotic enough to escape stylisation. All recorded for subsequent analysis, of course.

The outworlds, their defences were already partially disassembled for relocation. Relatively easy meat. A few salvos in their direction might arrive before they had time to raise a full shield - LTL fire crackled out at the nearest outworld and the asteroid stations.

Some small ships out there, freighters and transports, escort corvettes - the smaller ships of the squadron could be detached to deal with them, and lay siege to the outworlds.

Would that draw the rebel heavies in their direction? Lennart hoped so, knew that his own nav team would be plotting microjumps out there as a matter of routine.

Of the three primary targets, the two large rebel ships and the main world itself, One and Indivisible - the Lucrehulk - was in orbit - no, actually anchored to a skyhook.  
As conversions, and huge ships with a lot of space to play with, there were so many variants - scan called this one a late model combat carrier. Fairly impressive; a worthwhile target. Her powerplant was spiking as she ran up to full output, very fast reactions over there. One to watch. The skyhook, though, was inherently more vulnerable.

This would be the first test in combat of the new axial battery; the structure was there to take the load, the field generators were all in place and functioning, but it was still fresh pants on standby status. The Lucrehulk would manage partial shielding before the ship's fire could reach her, the hook wouldn't. Overkill time - the three huge four hundred and eighty teraton guns cracked out one shot each, everyone involved with their fingers crossed.

The ship shook, and one of the displays flickered, but a sequence of three forest green tracer lashed out downrange.

'Good. Roll us to bear, main guns single shot and target match your yields, LTL change target, mainworld, priorities for both shield generators, ion cannon, light turbolasers, heavy turbolasers in that order.'

The object was to render the planet vulnerable and exposed to further attack. Killing the light turbolasers before the heavies - Lennart had faith in his own ship's footwork, they could evade enough of the main defence batteries' fire, but the smaller craft he was less sure of.

'Heavy axials, your target is the One and Indivisible,' Lennart stopped before he could give a fire order. The thing was just sitting there. Playing chicken, to all intents and purposes. If the Empire wanted the planet intact, he couldn't afford to go around making half-petaton holes in the landscape - bold to the point of insanity. 'Shoot once it has cleared the silhouette of the planet.'

The gunnery liaison on the bridge parsed that into an order, transmitted it.

Black Prince turned to bear, and sprayed out shot after shot, a sparkling green bridge of tracer extending towards the planet.

Bridge? Too friendly, insufficiently aggressive an image. Then again, hadn't that been part of very early artillery terminology? Being 'shot into' a position, on a pont au feu - a bridge of fire to get the men over the obstacles. That fitted.

Hyperspace scanners picked up the first return fire coming their way. Predicted endpoints - all around them. A loose barrage-cone, the rebels' best chance to score some hits. Black Prince could take what was coming, but it was beyond the surge capacity of the frigates, beyond the total load of the corvettes.

Another good reason to detach them to pursue a secondary target.  
'Blackwood, you're subformation leader. Hit planet III, maximum burn out of the cone of incoming fire then dogleg. Their smaller craft, and that could be anything up to line destroyer, will probably bounce you. Be ready.'

To Brenn, he added 'Set up a nav solution for wave two, running update - use Blackwood's location as the end point, double usual safety offset.' The fighter wing bridge liaison was instructed, 'Pattern Delta, variant three. Target mainworld.'

That was an essentially cylinder-shaped attack, the fighter wing fanning out to avoid fire directed at the ship and moving forward to englobe the target. Variant three was to lead with the fighters, bombers relatively close behind, to draw defending fighters out and destroy them.

They would be striking at the same targets the main batteries were; Lennart expected to have to pull his guns off the planet and engage warship targets well before they got there.

He accelerated Black Prince outsystem at a tangent to the planet, passing out of as much of the cone of fire as possible and rolling to keep the fire arc open. Shielding down there was starting to come on line, but it would not have built up to full strength, nothing like. Possibly enough to stop light turbolaser fire, though.

'LTL, change target, One and Indivisible. He's inviting us in, he's refusing to come out and fight. He knows that we have him in a foul position. He'll raise shields and shelter under the planetary defence until something happens to distract us. Could be worth a fighter strike - thinking of that, helm, sell them a dummy, down twenty starboard thirty, hold that for eight seconds then resume normal evasion. These fabian tactics begin to irritate me,' Lennart said.

'Could they be doing something as simple as waiting for orders?' Brenn speculated. 'Command absent or dithering, so the bridge team spool the ship up fast but there's no-one with the authority to actually take her out to fight?'

'Tempting, but a damn dangerous assumption to base our approach on. Guns, hold fire on her now, keep stripping away the planetary defences, and let's see how she reacts to having the skyhook shot out from under her,' Lennart decided.

'First of our shot will hit in three seconds,' Rythanor announced. 'Looks good.'

Hyperwave scanners, instantly responsive, registered the impact of the first shots two minutes before the light could reach them. From that account, it was going to be a hell of a fireworks show.

The skyhook had managed to raise partial shielding, which had been a mistake - it meant that it absorbed all three half- petaton hits and erupted along the upper two thirds of its length.

The planet itself - there were gaps in the defence net anyway, things removed and sold off long ago, torn down by the rebels to relocate to other bases; time to a firing position where they could hit the Lucrehulk without turning the planet behind it into a cinder from near misses and overpenetrations?  
Time to exploit those gaps, burn them large enough to go in after it? It was a ridiculously large piece of live bait, after all. Lennart wanted to tear the holes in the planetary defence net open wide enough to force the rebs to come out to meet him, not to go in and get shredded by what there was left of it.

Rythanor turned round to report, saw the captain was looking intent over his shoulder and was aware of it anyway. Ion drive flares; One and Indivisible was moving at last.  
One hundred and thirty seconds from anchored and taking on freight to clearing the dockside? Helped slightly by the fact that the dockside had ceased to exist, of course.

'Guns, port - no, Starboard-2 switch to flak bursts, lay a shot on it every twenty seconds.' Probably not enough to stop it trying to launch fighters, as a continual blizzard of explosions would have, but enough to cook a lot of them.

The first shots from the planetary defence guns were starting to arrive, now. If the spreading stream of fire from Black Prince was a bridge, the converging effect of the defence batteries was a sandstorm of red and orange.

The light guns had reacted fastest, but it was near the limit of effective range for dual purpose turbolasers firing from or through an atmosphere. Good enough for their light guns to hit fighters, though, one reason Lennart had got his away so quickly, and good enough for his to do counterbattery on their light guns.

The heavies were pounding the planet as well, and scoring hits; there were four iridescent purple-blue mushroom shaped explosions where nodes of the shield network had been destroyed. Not mushroom clouds, they were inevitable and there would be enough of those later anyway, but as the shield generators were hit and destroyed, that release of energy came flooding out of the partially spread surface of the shield bubble.

Damn the Force for its inconvenience, Lennart thought, I think I can actually hear the planet screaming. Not the rebels, the world itself.

If it was, small wonder. Even on a precisely targeted fire plan - and the gun crews were doing a superb job - there were still hundreds of teratons a minute being pounded into Ord Corban. It would be another hundred seconds before it became clear to the telescopic eye, but the hyperwave could detect and the ship's computers infer from that what was happening.  
The planet's surface would be rippling, earthquake after earthquake, some of them the small and local concussions of TL hits, but at least two triggered fault lines.

The green flowers of impact would become less and less clear through a grey-brown haze of dust and atmospheric ejecta. The oceans wouldn't have started boiling off, not yet. A few more petatons for that.

And this was an aimed, necessary-force fire plan, against legitimate military targets.

The destruction of which was, in itself, a visual spectacle worth paying attention to. The green flare was followed by a white aftershock of the target detonating, which faded to a white-hot molten glow surrounded by a literal ring of fire, once the radiation intensities from the hit faded to a temperature at which chemistry was possible. Whatever they hit, if it didn't burn, it was vapourised down to its constituent elements, and then the vapour burned.

The planet's atmosphere would be absolutely foul, but the planetary facilities would survive a near miss, or this kind of punishment to the world around them. There would be enough left to drop troops on, when it came to that.

'We're doing too well, we shouldn't be doing this much damage, this soon,' Lennart said, hauling himself back from sightseeing mode to the situation at hand.

'We're beyond normal effective aimed fire range. By the book they would have expected us to manoeuvre closer, before springing any ambush.' Brenn pointed out.

In theory, aim a jump far enough outsystem to avoid giving warning from bow shock, and the normal-space emissions would give you away anyway. Arrive close enough to have no realspace warning, and anyone worth the effort of attacking would have sensors to spot the bow shock and have shields and weapons up and ready.  
The solution was a radically irregular hyperspace path in, waving your course track across the sky drastically enough to give warning to everyone but the target. It placed a lot of stress on the ship, another reason why wave one had been the high-acceleration ships, they were built to withstand that kind of punishment.

'Emerging this far away to draw them out, then jumping something in planetward for hammer and anvil, out here where we have room to fight? The problem with inflicting confusion on the enemy,' Lennart said in his lecturing voice, for the benefit of the bridge crew, 'is it makes the part of your own plan where you have to predict what the enemy thinks they're trying to do into a cast-durelium bitch…is that the first of the heavy shot coming our way now?'

'Yes, Captain,' Rythanor confirmed.

The incoming fire display showed the light guns sending wavering streams of tracer, hosing on and off target, but the first of the multi-teraton defence batteries, slower to get into action, just getting their bolts out to them now. Black Prince was in the fringes of the shot pattern, evading from entry proving valuable after all.

'Helm, we'll take this clump of shot bows on,' Lennart drew a highlight around one cluster of bolts, 'then I want a base course track like this.' Tracing it on the display, the computer taking account of the ship's velocity and delta-V, adjusting it back towards the possible.  
Not that it needed much in the way of revision, it was a feasible, arguably necessary move. Ride out the first close smear of shot then break outwards to the edge of the barrage pattern, and spiral inwards around it towards the planet.

Subject, of course, to modifications. Once they realised the blind barrage was largely ineffectual, the rebels, such of them as were left, would start playing the great old gunnery guessing game. Predicting his location on the basis of his intentions, and firing concentrated salvos at that point, as he tried to guess where they would fire and be anything but there. Lennart had lost rounds, even sets, but never the game. Not yet.

'I suppose it's possible that this might hurt…' Lennart said, again for the benefit of the bridge crew. 'Deflectors eighty forward.' The shields shifted to meet the attack as the first rebel heavy shot rolled in.

Planetary defence came in many forms, most of them driven far more by politics and the contrary forces of penny-pinching and paranoia than any real need or rational threat analysis. Virtually every civilised world worthy of the name had shields that could take a stray burst from freighter and liner ion drives, which would do to withstand LTL if it came to that.

Above that, the sky was the limit, up to and including ultraheavy shielding like Alderaan's, which was designed to survive the heaviest attack anyone thought feasible, a battle squadron of ten Mandator dreadnoughts unloading on it at full power for ten hours. Correction; had been designed.

Defensive firepower was much more variable. A former fleet base would have been designed to be a match for the heaviest ships it was intended to protect. That would have been, in theory, a medium cruiser.

Sixteen batteries, common buried command centre and dispersed, robust sensors serving three ball-turret four hundred teraton heavy turbolasers, spaced twenty to forty kilometres apart with point defence around each. Being a planet, half of those could bear on any given target.

Twenty array batteries, each of twelve forty teraton heavy turbolasers, again, half of which could bear.

Lennart wasn't worried too much about the forties. His ship could take that, had done so before; it would take a lot of concentrated hits to get through the shielding. The four hundreds could prove a problem.

The first splash of fire burnt through the space around his ship; two small twitches, concussions as one shot hit on the port side of the superstructure, one aft and starboard.

Not bad shooting, but not a problem yet.

If they couldn't put enough fire from those things into Black Prince at this range fast enough to overload the shields, and unless Lennart was spectacularly stupid and allowed his ship to be hit they couldn't, then they had to either move the planet to him - which was not entirely ridiculous but certainly beyond the means of the rebellion - or get him to come closer.

Which he would have thought One and Indivisible was doing, but for the absurdity of being prepared to sacrifice a medium cruiser to kill a destroyer. They had to hope for extraordinary luck with the bigger guns, or they had to come out to meet him.

And damn the Force again, for trying to think of ways it could make itself useful. Although to call the Jedi to mind, not many of them would have said what amounted to 'neener neener neener', even if projective telepathy did work that way.

'Fighters coming up, lining up to microjump out to us, five or six squadrons, exit point - hmph,' Rythanor gave a little grunt of amusement as he marked their point of emergence on the main tactical map. Predicted position from where Black Prince had been two hundred seconds ago - right in the middle of the cone of fire.

'So there were failures of coordination on the rebel side from the word go,' Lennart said, thinking about it. 'let the fighters emerge, let them take losses, then pull the LTL on to them once they've managed to form up and made themselves a nice compact target again.'

Gunnery acknowledged, then there was a kick on the port side over the extension. One of the four-hundreds had got lucky. No penetration, no bleed through, a lot of heat to be got rid of.

If they had made the standard approach to an undistinguished planet, that the standard defence setup was intended to face, they would have come out at one light second. That was close enough to the planet that bow shock would have given the defenders enough warning to raise theatre shields and arm guns. Then they would have commenced a fairly predictable run in, straight and level to release fighters and dropships.  
A well drilled defence force could have managed an eighty plus percent hit rate under those conditions, and a standard Imperator class destroyer would have been lucky to last twenty seconds.

Against Third Superiority, they must have been either very startled, so much so they only got a few batteries into action, not possible considering the ambush, or they had actually been shooting to cripple and capture. Fist had been truly fortunate to make it out. Either that or Tevar was better at the footwork than she realised. There was some revenge to be had there, too; how soon to bring them in?

Assume the rebel trap had already failed, bring the entire squadron in to pound the planet? Rely on 851 as backup to cover what else may happen?

Peltast, Daring, Speaker, Varangian and Tigress were within reach. Tector, Allegiance, Imperator-II, Venator, Imperator-I in that order. A lot of firepower, and a lot of men hungry for action and advancement too. Arguably, he was letting his own squadron down by failing to secure as much of the glory was possible for them. Although that was more like counting reptavians before they hatch.

Careful, he warned himself. If they're trying to lure me into a false sense of security in turn, then they could be doing a much worse job. And absolutely, above all, ignore that surge of triumphalism that came from the dark side.

Black Prince was in what her helm control team unofficially called reluctant film star mode; an unrolling red carpet spread out beneath her, which she was doing everything possible to avoid having to walk down.

The heavies were a deeper, more crimson red, beautiful in its own terrifying way. Looking ahead, down the hyperwave's advance scan, the focus of fire wobbled, billowed, narrowed and darted to one side - that was the dummy, and it took them well clear.

Too much shot in the air to evade on an individual basis, and even their 'towed array' - the hyperspace orbiting scanner - was now coming close to being washed out - part of that was jamming, too. Relatively light fire pattern, starting to slacken considering so many of the defences had been hit, but, what was their jamming intended to achieve? Especially timed to coincide with…

'Helm, take us across this track here,' Back into the fire, skimming the edges of the concentrated stream.

Brenn looked at him, Lennart could hear the wheels of his mind turn, then he said 'You really think they're that good?'

'Well, it's about time they showed some evidence of competence.'

The destroyer curved back along the column of crimson and scarlet, five red flowers on the outer hull of bolt impacts being partially deflected, four forties and a four hundred. Painful, but compared to what they had already dealt out, trivial. Lennart glanced at the shield status board; ray shields had equalised from the forward-heavy setup, back to a more even, and more tactically appropriate, spread. Good. That was what he had been about to order, anyway.

This was what it was all about, the intelligent anticipation, everyone knowing their part and able to count on each other to do theirs in turn, the collective machine, the finely honed skill that made the ship what it was.

In fact, right now the least trustworthy part of the system was himself. Was there any possibility the Force was leading him into error? That he was overestimating his opponent, or just plain wrong? It was certainly possible that he could waste enough time second-guessing himself enough to put the ship in danger.

An entire planet is shooting at me, Lennart thought, and I'm wondering where the nearest psychiatrist's couch is. Well, it's not as if they're doing a particularly good job of it.

The superluminal sensor picture was blurring and clearing, fading in and out as the control team gained and lost ground against the planetary ECM. Lennart turned to look at the gunnery liaison, said, 'Do something about that, would you?'

Gunnery were already bumping up the planet's antenna grids on the target priority list, before he had finished saying it.

Lennart had been a passenger on board 'The Old Warhorse'- HIMS Guarlara- transferring from one staff command to another once, eighteen years ago, and it had been one of the eeriest experiences of his life.

Utter, total, absolute silence on the bridge. A look, a gesture, a nod, a raised eyebrow - attention was drawn and orders were given without a single word being spoken. The bridge team had been drilled that well, knew each others' minds that thoroughly.

It had been an inspiration, but to try to follow that example would have led Lennart right back to the psychiatrist's couch. Kriff, it had taken him years to get his crew to the opposite state, where he could say something that imprecise and they could extract his intention from it, and use their own judgement as to how to implement it.

'Skipper, One and Indivisible is warming up her hyperdrive,' Cormall reported, in one of the moments of clarity.

'What does Blackwood's sensor picture look like?' Lennart asked.

'She's in the fringes of the cone of jamming as well, doesn't have our power, they are, wait, tentative contacts, bowshock focused on them, multiple, probable frigate class. We show two,' Rythanor reported from the master station.

'Brenn, nav course to support Blackwood?' Lennart asked. This would have to be done fast, more shell game than leapfrog.

'We jump to support them against this pair, One and Indivisible jumps us, that's their plan?'

'I do believe so,' Lennart said. No, wait, plan B. The bridge team saw him thinking. 'Do you have a course set for Ord Corban?'

'Place the endpoint,' Brenn said, calling it up.

Lennart dotted the pointer in place, on the night side where their vector would carry them on past the world, a crossing target. 'Initiate.'

Black Prince leapt into hyperspace again, a short hop - now this was what you could call ripping the tiger's tonsils out. "Gravity well" was an inherently fuzzy concept. "Inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them"- there was no edge and no end.  
Practically speaking, what mattered was the ability of the ship's tensor and stasis fields to overcome the stress that accelerating tachyonically under tidal pull placed on the ship.

This was going to be rough. Fun, but rough. Black Prince plunged deeper into the system's gravity well - a huge number of prayers suddenly offered up to deities of excrement and durasteel - emerged, a sprawling, off centre blue-white flare, a mere two planetary diameters from Ord Corban.

Less journey time than it took a rebel signal-interpreter to boggle at her board and yell, 'What in the name of the Force are they doing?'

'Guns…' Lennart said, watching the main sensor board pull itself back together. That had been the point of the exercise. Clear line of sight to One and Indivisible. The Lucrehulk's entire underside was a mix of half-molten and carbon black where the skyhook had gone up, a few patches where local shields had been active and had held. That would soon change.

'…converged sheaf, my mark. Fire.'

Over the engine bells. One time - on-target hammerblow, a single three thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight teraton strike. The rebel ship's shield took the first impact, but there were power surges through its hull as it strained to do so.

Helm slid Black Prince away from the inevitable rebel reaction as the planetary defence batteries reoriented themselves, sideslipping and counter-rolling to maintain alpha.

The second full converged salvo burned into the same shield panel, and while the generators tried to mutually reinforce each other, tried to share the load, they failed.

That was beyond even single shot battleship firepower, it was beyond the usual simultaneous-impact fire of any line or light destroyer, it was enough to cause an electrical explosion that ripped plating off the aft of the ship and a trail of burnt, ionising air and vapour.

'Captain, Blackwood wants Voracious' wingco shot and tried in that order. Says he's opened fire on him,' Rythanor reported.

Lennart glanced at the main board; there were indeed torpedoes in the air, heading in the rough general direction of the light forces wave one. 'Most of the fighters following him are ours, trust them,' Lennart said.

The third salvo - a little longer to charge - crashed out. One and Indivisible was in the middle of her run to hyperspace entry; under tachyonic drive, main engines no longer essential. Which was just as well, considering two of them were destroyed by the impact of the green wall of bolts.

Four impacts on Black Prince's belly, three forties and a four hundred. They were close enough to the planet for proper aimed fire - in both directions; Lennart looked to helm and nodded. They flared the engines, surge forwards and roll port, reverse roll and spin port to maintain bearing, yaw on to target.

The planet was a mess. At this range, it was possible to see what a disaster they had made of it; there would be no-one going for R&R on those beaches for a long, long time. It was, however, still more or less functional as a military base, and even if it could no longer properly defend itself, it could try to take them with it.  
Run the rope out as far as they could, get some fire in, then move clear before the planetary defence started lobbing eight petaton converged sheaves back at Black Prince.

'Skipper, what about-' Rythanor said, again; Lennart knew the sensor board was about to provide its own answer.

One and Indivisible made a clumsy exit from hyperspace, in ambush position on a ship that wasn't there any more, ready to support the emerging Munificent-class frigate and MC40 attempting to engage Light Forces Detachment One.  
There was a second slight drawback to the rebel plan; their Lucrehulk had a salvo of antiship torpedoes headed up its backside.

'You realised he had planned that?' Brenn asked Lennart, trying not to be too surprised.

'I thought that was what he had in mind, yes,' Lennart replied, coolly.

'Do you think we should have Vehrec tested for Force sensitivity as well? Might take some of the heat off you,' Brenn said.

'Kriff, no, I wouldn't wish that on anybody, it was just intelligent anticipation.' Lobbing a torpedo salvo, on IFF homing, at the space where you suspected an enemy ship was going to emerge from hyperspace, was a neat stunt if it worked.

At least, Lennart profoundly hoped Vehrec had remembered to call for torps on IFF only homing.

'Speaking of intelligent anticipation, and heat,' Lennart said, looking at the image of the planetary defence batteries turning to bear. One of them vanished in green fire as it was on screen, but there would be others.

'Clear, or to target?'

'Clear,' Lennart decided. 'Call in wave two on the One and Indivisible. We move to open space on overwatch and then, when the rebels react to wave two, we move to intercept whatever that is.'

Brenn announced 'Point Delta', and Black Prince leapt to hyperspace, for the fourth time that day.

'Captain, engineering would like to remind you that you're burning energy as if it was going out of fashion, and rebel deliveries to us really aren't sufficiently dependable,' the engineering officer detailed as bridge contact man looked up and said.

'Tell Mirannon, I can arrange for him to trade the rebel chief engineer's problems for his own if he likes,' Lennart bounced back, grinning. 'Galactic Spirit, I love this job.'

The waiting ships of Wave Two - most of them still trying to work out what that meant - did have some sensor feedback from the other craft of wave one, in addition to what their own hyperspace sensors could tell them.  
'In case I forget,' Lennart had told Kovall on the Blackwood, who realised that meant 'In case I'm too busy and/or dead to order it.' So the second wave were mostly getting their tactical picture from the recon variant strike cruiser. And boggling at it.

'Well, we should move in now, if only to relieve him. Captain Lennart's obviously completely lost his mind and thinks he's flying a TIE fighter,' was Fist's navigator's opinion.

'Maybe so, but it seems to work for him,' Tevar pointed out. The mood on her improvised emergency bridge was sour, at best. She would have thought 'foul', but that brought the walls to mind. They were in what had been Damage Control bunker Dorsal-140, the main maintenance and repair centre for the bridge tower and its electronics. It had seemed an efficient shortcut at the time; instead of moving the equipment to the problem, move the problem to the equipment. Less awkward than trying to run her ship from gunnery control again, the space simply wasn't up to it - too busy, too crowded with other things, other noise.

So here they were in a cramped, but at least armoured-walled space, a rough replica of a starship's bridge, airlock unclosable because of all the hastily laid cables connecting the desks and vidpanels to the ship's main computer net. It was claustrophobic, but then claustrophobia seemed to fit the bill now.

'He can't do that!' Tevar's navigator expostulated. 'It's simply not possible. You cannot handle a capital ship like that.'

'Evidently, he can. Engines?' Tevar said, meaning the engineering liaison to the bridge.

'Well, it's not mechanically impossible. A ship with that loading and structural uncertainty being handled like that, though - she should get pulled in for major refit, and a court of inquiry for her captain for half tearing her guts out. It can be done, but not without consequences,' the engineer said.

'He doesn't seem too worried about consequences,' Tevar said, nodding at the sensor table and meaning Lennart.

'A crew prepared to take that flying scrapheap into action would have to be capable of anything,' the engineering liaison said. He stopped himself just sort of asking the question that was on all their minds - what the kriff they were doing there.  
They hadn't been present for Lennart's discussion - bombshell, really; also hadn't spent two hours on the com to their parents asking them to confirm, to fill in the blanks, and what to do next.

In theory it was culpably disloyal to do anything of the sort; for an Imperial officer to solicit the private opinion of any civilian, however well connected and however closely related, on how they were to go about fulfilling their duty was not permitted. Worse, it was a sign of weakness that an ambitious crew would take advantage of, although she wasn't overly worried about that now. She didn't think anyone was crazy enough to want to be in the hot seat.  
It had been useful. She had tried not to worry her mother and father, tried not to make it sound as if she was saying, or even thinking loudly, goodbye. They were going to be busy enough dodging assassins.

What they had been able to tell her tended to confirm Lennart's story, out of sector interests - outer rim thugs and core world money - long on resources and short on compassion. Bribery and assassination, blackmail and sabotage, very fast and very dirty. Individuals were discredited, family names dragged through the mud, dirty secrets dug up. Shamelessly populist and power-hungry, they soon had the majority of the people baying for the blood of the old ruling class, and all done with the full panoply of the New Order.

Some of the accusations were true, of corruption within and conspiring against the Senate, aid given to the Separatists back in the war and associations against the Empire. Some of them were entirely unbelievable of course, but all of them, even - no, especially the unbelievable ones, 'they' had managed to find evidence to hold up in court.

The old ruling families had not gone quietly. House Tevar had fought in the invisible war, won a few battles, lost a few; the family portfolio was thinner than it had been, and there were two uncles no-one ever spoke of any more.

There had also nearly been a fiance. It would have been an arranged marriage to a potential ally, one of the few honest believers in the New Order to arrive in sector, an ISB Special Investigator and anticorruption crusader who was starting to make a name for himself, and trouble for his bosses. Hjalmar Amarin, foully murdered by 'revanchists'; some parts of him had never turned up, although his colleagues had each been sent a lobe of his brain, and his genitals had been posted to her mother. Her family had not sworn revenge, war of the knife and to the bitter end; that would have been nothing but complicated mass suicide.

They were not great enough to be worth exterminating root and branch, they had at least had the chance to swallow their pride, and had officially made their peace with the new powers of the sector. They had hidden what they could and took what steps were available to safeguard what was not, such as steering a daughter of the house into a navy command.

That and worm away, rebuild power and contacts and prepare for a chance at revenge.

Which, thanks to the madman who was now throwing his starship around as if she was a fighter, was now a distinct possibility. Her parents were going to be very busy over the next few days. She, at least, was going to be very busy for the next few minutes. After that, everything got uncertain.

One thing Lennart had said that did stick in her mind: throw the peacetime system away. You are not flying a capital ship. Worst mistake - and believe me, there's a lot of competition - that Tarkin ever made, he had said.

Small scale system should have been abolished with prejudice and that should have been hammered into BOSS's heads with, well, with hammers. Bureau of ships and services, gang of rat-bastard inbred yokel bureaucrats, how much worse a combination could there be?

Anyway, Fist isn't a battleship, or a carrier, or an assault ship, or a multirole cruiser, or any such nonsense, he had said. She's a line destroyer, a heavy skirmisher with speed a weapon and a defence. Handle her like a battleship, a big, slow stable gun platform, and you're doomed, manoeuvre and you might survive.

Which he was demonstrating, in spades. Black Prince was in far better shape than she appeared under the skin. Tevar watched the action play itself out, the dash out of the cone of fire, the mottled ship playing with the rebel barrage, dancing in and out of the fringes and taunting them. The flagship took a few hits, nothing desperate, only four or five heavies, which compared to the fire she was spitting out, was nothing. Impressive. Not the easiest example to follow, stuck here in the bowels of a damaged ship now going back to beg for more.

The light forces she watched shake themselves out into formation, the recon conversion Strike frigate and the two Fulgur in arrowhead. They moved, accelerating out of the shower of energy bolts - the rebels could have scored if they'd followed them up, but they hadn't, foolishly choosing to fire on a target that could withstand their shot.

The rebels arrived, two frigates, the old Munificent and an MC40. In theory, it was an even match in terms of tonnage and raw power. In practise, a heavy and a medium frigate against a medium and two light frigates, two heavy two medium and three light corvettes - interestingly asymmetric.

The rebels were probably wrong to rely on a Munificent, especially one that was being handled was if it was a large ship. Further illustration of the principle.  
They were in a good initial position but a bad vector, with the Imperial ships receding rapidly from them, and alerted. The old Clone War frigate carried two eighty-teraton turbolasers and enough lighter guns to push the single salvo firepower up near that of a Meridian, but they had made a lot of tradeoffs to get there. They gave up a lot of damage tolerance with that hollow, bitty hull, they didn't carry enough power generation to get anything like the same rate of fire out of their heavy guns, and worst from the rebel point of view, the structural strength the open hull gave away limited its maximum acceleration.

In a way, it was very characteristically Rebel, trying to do hit and run in a ship that couldn't run, and handled like it was half shot already. Mind you, that led to thoughts about how often they got away with it.

In theory, the slowest ships in the strike line had an eight hundred and fifty 'g' advantage - and the fastest a twenty-one hundred 'g' edge. They could treat it as if it was standing still. Detached Forces Wave One took full advantage of that, accelerating into the attack and firing a narrow basket - a small grouped, coordinated area shoot, converging on the Rebel flagship.

The MC-40 moved away from its partner to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, but it could only lay sixteen guns on target, and chose the wrong one by shooting for Blackwood.

The Imperial medium frigate was, in theory, outclassed. In practise, Kovall took his ship out of the group, accelerating away at a tangent, varying thrust randomly, twisting and rolling, trying to force the rebels away from a consistent stream of fire to an open sheaf shoot that she could take relatively easily.

Provided it wasn't a full power shot from one of the eighties that connected.

The rebel gunnery was a little better than the Imperial, but the Imperials had a much easier target - advantage the Empire's green cone of light against the scarlet line the Rebels were drawing on the sky. If the rate of shield depletion was a guide, the rebels were going to lose.

Then things got very strange indeed, as the wave of Imperial fighters, detached on their own target, stood on their tails and fired a torpedo salvo at the Imperial flotilla. Fortunately, no-one had time to say or do anything that would later prove to have been embarrassingly silly, because then the obvious target emerged, one slightly singed and somewhat dented Lucrehulk.

That was when Wave Two's order to commit came through.

The drop point in the accompanying data was close to Wave One, close enough for mutual support to begin with, low and on the bow of the rebel ship; did she have a useful alternative? Anything to add? To calculate an alternative entry would take two minutes, at least. Valuable time.

Tevar was the ranking officer of the wave, a commander on Perseverance, a senior lieutenant of all things on Voracious. This part of the battle belonged to her.

For a moment, the thought occurred to her to take this lot, these ships away, and go and pursue the Moff and his friends, go and rescue her parents. Only for a moment. Even if they would follow her, there was the fact that the Moff was next on the hit list.

Still - one transport. Her personal shuttle, with a picked unit - headquarters guard team. That, she could spare. Surely it was not beyond the bounds of duty to safeguard the lives of two valuable members of the notability of the sector, even if they did happen to be her own kin.

She gave the order quickly, then added, 'On the flag's course, initiate.'

One and Indivisible was not having a good battle, so far. Ambushed, dock shot out from under her, and then with the base's computers she had plotted a jump out to try to get the drop on the Imperial destroyer. They had expected Lennart to jump inwards, they had been prepared for that much. What they had thought was that the Imperial ship would be slower to calculate and slower to manoeuvre.

The aim was to catch Black Prince as she was committed to jumping in, get a minute or so free and clear to pound the smaller ship, and then if that was not enough catch her in crossfire with the planet's defence guns.

Instead, the Imperial ship had been faster, had hit them - hard - and then manoeuvred clear, leaving them with nothing in range but a handful of slippery-difficult light ships to target.

Engines damaged, it could not pursue, but powerplant and weapons were fine. No issues there. Just an enormous weight of fire, weapons fit to match the planet below, concentrated and coordinated.

The light force elements had scattered as the cruiser had emerged; corvettes and frigates had no business getting into a stand-up fight with anything that big.

Lennart had taken - no, had made - the one chance that the smaller units needed by maiming the cruiser too badly to let it pursue them.

They could out-accelerate the One and Indivisible by twenty-five kilometres per second per second, and almost all had the sense to do exactly that, opening the range and radically zig-zagging to avoid the howling walls of red light coming from the cruiser.

It was no unitary big gun ship, vaguely symmetrically laid out but a mosh of twenty-fives, thirties, forties, fifties and fifty-sixes, seventies and eighties, one-twenties, one-fifties and one-eighties, two hundreds and two hundred thirties. They seemed to have a few each of most of the heavy turbolaser models made. More than enough power to put behind them, though.

The Fulgurs' turrets were carried on the widest points of their hull, and could bear aft. Blackwood and the two Carracks had limited aft fire, the Bayonets had almost none. What harrassing fire they could give to cover their retreat, they did.

The first casualty was the Iron Turnip, a victim of her commander's enthusiasm. The Bayonet class medium corvette had tried to yaw to return fire, open her broadside and bow arcs on the 'filled doughnut' of the Lucrehulk.

Lennart and Kovall both commed her commander, one to tell him to get back in formation, one to order him to keep running.

Two inaccurate volleys from a rapidly banking ship were all the Turnip got off, as it tried to prolong the burn back into a course away - but for that time, she was a relatively stable target.

The first glancing hit was from a 120- teraton turbolaser, and blew out the shields with a huge, chemical looking explosion of vapourised durasteel from the little ship's belly. Crippled and drifting, a handful of life pods made it out before a pair of eighties scored a direct hit. Gone.

One of the Marauders made the mistake of trying to deploy her fighter squadron. TIE/Ln and Bombers, incapable of jumping in. With bombs and antiship torpedoes, they probably were the most effective weapon available to the little ship, but now was not the time.

The inevitable happened - forced to choose between running a straight course for deployment and an evasive pattern for survival, something went wrong.  
One of the /sa bombers, freshly deployed, found its parent ship forced to break off and evade, turning right into it. The Marauder was more than 400 'g' faster than the bomber, and ran it down - one of the bombs prematured.  
Between the damage and the confusion, the Marauder ceased evading long enough for a 50-teraton bolt to catch it and flash it to vapour, too.

That was the end of the first phase, the mad scramble clear when all of the Imperial ships could be engaged.

Now it was time for the Rebel gunnery officer to collect the batteries back into a coherent fire plan, and eliminate the scattered Imperial light forces while Nav worked out a pursuit plan for that damned destroyer.

Just the right time for three Imperial destroyers to emerge from hyperspace, then.

Fist, Perseverance, Voracious and their escorts flashed back to baryonic space in the planned position, fifty thousand kilometres distant from One and Indivisible, turning as it did had put them behind and below.

'Away retrieval tugs and shuttles,' Caliphant remembered to order. He got blank, disbelieving looks from most of the bridge team. 'Oh, yes. Fire.'

All three destroyers had a shot at the already damaged section, and decided to take it. The distance was too short for the rebel to react, it tried to twist out of the way and expose fresh shields and gun batteries - not fast enough.

The Imperial ships all fired in their own styles, Fist in controlled three-gun salvos, Perseverance in solid block salvos, Voracious in a continuous sequential fire.

In its own way, a Lucrehulk was as exoskeletal as her smaller confederation relatives, built around her long curving hangars each capable of holding tens, hundreds of thousands of droid fighters - far more small craft than the Alliance could ever hope to find crews for.  
Whoever had refitted this example had been well aware of that, and had chosen to fill the innermost staging hangars with structural bracing and ablative-absorbent foamcrete. That was probably all that saved her, as the Imperial destroyers pounded in salvo after salvo. The Alliance cruiser twisted and bucked under the pounding, fireball after fireball splattering her port limb as she painfully tried to manoeuvre clear, and failed.

The port quarter prime shield generator was one of the casualties, converting a temporary gap in the defences into a permanent one.

The weapon galleries along the port side of the arc of the ship died or fell back on emergency power as the main power trunking was shattered, the incandescent flowers of vapourised metal almost hid the ship; eventually her frantically driven thrusters managed to swing the battered cruiser round far enough to cover the gap.

Not quite in time to forestall a wave of fighter torpedoes. Fired blind, they could not, could not possibly, have been targeted on a specific component, a specific weakness, in advance; just as well they didn't need to be. Passively targeted, little advance warning, a ship under heavy attack from another quarter might be forgiven for missing the incoming. Were it not for the consequences.

In avoiding one threat, One and Indivisible turned directly into another. The gaping hole in the ship's structure presented itself to the Imperial salvo, and they took full advantage.

Damage to sensors, power systems, weapon mounts - point defence did what it could, but that was hardly enough. Of the two hundred and fifty heavy warheads fired, a hundred and forty managed to detonate inside the ship.

The fireball burst out of the length of the port arm of the cruiser, the structural strengthening overwhelmed, the bays consumed in the rolling blast wave. Every joint, every weak point slashed open, and nine twentieths of the cruiser's firepower and half her fighter complement obliterated.

The rebel ship benefited from one miracle when the after main sectional bulkhead held, but she needed more than that. Her situation, blind to one entire side of the sky and barely able to manoeuvre, could fairly be described as desperate.

The planetary defence batteries were too far away to offer anything except narrowly targeted fire which would almost certainly miss, or broad arc barrages which would inflict at least as much damage on the cruiser. Her own fighter complement could launch to try to hold the Imperial warships off - but they were going to have to face the sublight capable fighters pouring out of Fist and Voracious, and their escorts in wave two.

The MC-40 was facing down too much opposition. It could resort to maximum possible evasion, keeping Imperial eyes and guns on them and drawing fire off One and Indivisible, but throwing their own aim off so far that they had no chance to achieve anything.

The other choice was to slow down, evading less drastically and allowing their own fire a chance to achieve some damage. Unwisely, the rebel ship chose the second option.  
That was exactly what the Imperial ships were wishing for. The rebel frigate intended to fire a brief, concentrated salvo out of all sixteen guns that could bear, against a ship small enough to actually take out, then go back to evasion. It got the first part right. The reb settled onto a shallow curve and hammered out a burst of red at the most effective target it could find, one of the two antifighter Lancers that had survived the previous battle along with Tevar.

The target was a little slow, a little dozy, nothing for its own guns to do yet so the Lancer's crew weren't fully alert. That made it a good target, and the stream of rebel shot burnt away the unfocused shielding, carved the aft end of the Imperial ship apart and opened up the main reactor.

Imperial return fire did nothing so elegant; then again, with twenty-three heavy and over two hundred medium turbolasers, it didn't have to. Brute firepower was enough to pound down the Alliance ship's shielding and rip the structure apart, leaving it a melted, broken wreck. Fair exchange for a Lancer.

That left the fifty or so smaller ships, between them the same firepower as a destroyer, free to concentrate on the Lucrehulk.

So far, the Imperial plan was working. With a crippled ship stranded in mid system and the planetary defences with a huge breach carved in them, the Rebellion's options reduced to two:  
The first one being, admit defeat. Accept the loss of Ord Corban and One and Indivisible, but refuse to incur further losses by reinforcing failure. They still had two large, valuable ships, what they had managed to strip already, and their most important gain, personnel who had had a chance to work with and learn on heavy shipyard equipment. It would be a severe but not total loss.

Option two, the one the Imperials were hoping for, was that the rebels were too badly stunned, too poorly coordinated and too fixated on their previous victory to realize actually what the situation was, and that they would reinforce. The locals certainly had no intention of stopping fighting; the maimed Alliance cruiser managed a half-turn, partly on steering thrusters and partly on recoil, rolling to present what batteries she could to the Imperial ships tearing into her. At that point, the Imperial plan, or lack of plan, became a problem. Coordination; what did they do now? Manoeuvre as a close line of battle, move out on independent vectors to englobe - and in either case, where to? Sweep round and head for the planet, burn to remain on station, holding point in the mid system, return to rendezvous point, what?

Blackwood compounded the problem by reporting incoming. Predicted drop point ten thousand kilometres sunward - along the threat axis - from the One and Indivisible.

Tevar was wrong; the ranking officer on station was actually Konstantin Vehrec. He knew what he intended to do; englobe and do as much damage as possible to the emerging rebels before they had time to work out where they were and what was going on. It was always dangerous, almost always more so than it needed to be, jumping into the middle of a fight. Emerging on the edge was a much sounder tactical option, most of the time.  
It was definitely tempting, to detach some of the small craft with torpedoes to bounce the latest batch of rebels on entry, but he had a job to do, which was looking less like a planetary strike now than it was a planetary blockade.

Lycarin knew exactly what he wanted to do; go for the bold and brash, engage at close quarters. He accelerated towards the predicted emergence point.  
Caliphant's decision was informed by slightly more tactical subtlety. Voracious was inherently more fragile than the other two ships, although she could still hit hard. Taking account of both those things- ten degrees down and sixty degrees starboard, off the threat axis, avoid being led into a crossfire.

Tevar had the largest and most dangerous, also the most obviously damaged ship. She would be the obvious target.

The most effective thing she could do would be to take off at a tangent between that of Voracious and Perseverance, keeping close enough to both of them for mutual support, and until that threat did materialize keep firing on One and Indivisible.

Black Prince was monitoring the situation, and it was good, as far as it went. The flagship had a better read on the incoming, anyway.

'This should be interesting - I wasn't expecting that at this stage of the action. Right thing for them to do, though,' Lennart said.

Brenn knew what was coming, and interrupted his commanding officer with the obvious answer to the obvious question; 'Commit wave three now, let them deal with it.'

'Leaving the last of the heavies to us. Seems to make sense,' Lennart agreed.

The long range plot showed the full subsector. The approach path of the rebel ships was visible, as were the projected tracks of the other units of 851. They were on a converging spiral pattern, a classic hunter's move spiralling in on Ord Corban, with a close pass at Iushnevan just in case. They were the final reserve. Might not be necessary. Hopefully.

'Final drop point, formation centre…here,' Lennart decided, marking the tactical map up. He chose a point on the opposite side from the direction Wave Two were manoeuvring in, cover their tails from the incoming Rebel strike. Thirty thousand kilometres off.

'Send them out, and signal Perseverance, tell Lycarin to get the hair out of his arse and vector twenty degrees to starboard to cover Fist. He's making far too easy a target of himself and that thing can still shoot, even if it can't manoeuvre.'

By the time that order got to him, Commander Lycarin was only too happy to obey. He had made a mistake, and the splatter of turbolaser fire around his ship was hammering that in - his shields were already fully focused forward and having lumps carved out of them.

The rebel cruiser's main reactor was shock damaged and unable to sustain full power, the secondary in the core ship was running on maximum rated, and the guns were taking as much of it as they could stand. The gunners were jittery, and their systems were not fully effective - Fist had the only really heavy ion cannon in the squadron, and she had been using them. The Lucrehulk was a big ship with a lot of mass, worse dead-weight that could be used to soak up an ion bolt.

They had made some difference, but not enough to save Perseverance from her commander's gung-ho stupidity. His shields were coming apart, the rebel was only too happy to have something solid to shoot back at, even if their hit rate was low.

Black Prince's wake-up call came just in time; Perseverance broke off the attack entirely, and threw the base course out of the window - wild swooping curves, maximum effort into evasion.

Perseverance could return fire with her missiles, over her shoulder - it was far from optimum but it was the best she could do. They made more difference by getting in the way of rebel shot than anything their hitting would achieve.

There was one saving factor; not all the Lucrehulk's guns could bear on her. The hull form made it impossible, unlike their equivalents in size in the Imperial fleet they simply had no alpha arc. That left the rest of her guns free to spray fire at the smaller craft of the force.

Perseverance transferred shield focus aft, which saved her engines and bridge from being ripped apart- briefly; the light units didn't have that much resilience to begin with.

The minelayer variant Strike, Havoc, caught a burst from the cruiser; a solid medium type, she could take about one and a half petatons total, any single hit of a hundred teratons would blow out a shield panel. Her shields flared out in one blaze of vapourised durasteel, and her bow blew apart. Havoc firewalled her engines and tried to manoeuvre; one more good reason for Black Prince being on overwatch - she could send the crippled 'cruiser' - medium frigate - an escape course. The maimed cruiser managed to run up to hyperspace, flashing past the crippled rebel and clear back to the initial rendezvous.

One tactical option closed down. It would have been useful to be able to mine the emergence point - and even now, perhaps they could learn from the rebels and do a distant ballistic drop. Let Havoc stabilise and do damage control before putting that one into practise.

The rebel gunners were still reacting to circumstances, still scattering fire across the Imperial squadron. If they had held the focus of fire on one ship after another, or two, they would have been able to do real damage and reduce their numbers much faster than one or two guns going after each Imperial. They didn't.

On the other hand, the Lucrehulk, even in that state, still put out nine petatons a second. Wide, scattered fire still carried a lot of power. It could do damage. Enough to beat the imperial ships off before they could kill it? Probably not. Not without help. Which was on its way. Wave Two had relayed data from the flag and Blackwood, and their own sensors confirmed by acquiring the incoming thirty seconds out.

Two rebel major warships; they flashed back into realspace in close company, the Alliance regional support force MC-80 Mon Evarra, and the formerly Imperial star destroyer Reiver. Eight smaller ships with them, a Dreadnaught, an Acclamator, a Neutron Star, two Quasar Fire and four light corvettes.

Brenn noticed Lennart studiously refusing to take any special notice of the Mon Evarra. Which was odd, considering she was the ship Black Prince had been ambushed and heavily ionised by. The ship that had landed them in this sector, in this mess, in the first place.

'Kor Alric's going to be disappointed in you,' he said to Lennart.

'Specifically or in general? The rest of the squadron can handle them. Quick massed fire, knock them out then turn back on the cruiser. That,' he said referring to the image of the last inbound on the main sector map, the former flagship of the Hundred and Eighteenth Republic Fleet, Admonisher, 'is our personal prey.'


	38. Chapter 38

Iushnevan orbital space, His Imperial Majesty's Starship Oyadan, Urbanus-class light cruiser.

Lieutenant-Commander Nguyen was sitting in the in-pit observer's chair, overseeing his team as they calculated their way through a range of contingencies. He was not the ship's capital-N navigator, but he was the senior ranking member of the branch currently on board, a circumstance which was really starting to worry him.

Oyadan was short-handed, had no mission, was just hanging there in orbit. That was a very strange state for the flagship of a sector fleet whose sector was exploding around it.

Working out the pattern of who was present and who was absent made things look even less above board.

He did not have the spotless record that might be expected for service aboard a fleet flagship. No military offences, not really, and very few political - well, none he had been caught for anyway.

He was a man with a family to support, and he had taken unofficial steps to help himself do that. Renting out his expertise, mainly - providing courses off the military map to civilian spacers, using the ship's computers to calculate for them, under the pretence of training and exercise.

It was technically illegal, but it wasn't really wrong, was it? Just a man with responsibilities, dodging his way through life, trying to support what sometimes felt like an entire ozark's worth of in-laws.

There was an older standard, going back to the republic fleet when the amount of a spacer's pay had been lower and the timing of it essentially random, when pretty much every man had been expected to make what of his opportunities he could. It only really counted as theft when a man took something that left his shipmates short, only really counted as corruption when he took more than his services were worth.

Lieutenant-Commander Nguyen was not quite up to regional or strategic force standards. He had never found occasion to take a destroyer through the Kessel run, never found himself having to turn off the computers and plot a course on a slide rule. He was well above average, though, and charged a fair rate for his services - or gratis, in the case of his youngest brother in law and his business partner, who thought they knew how to fly a light freighter and got lost with embarrassing frequency.

That and, when all was said and done, it was useful exercise, and it did help keep the department in practise. By any reasonable interpretation of the old standard, he was an honest man.

What was worrying him was how few of his shipmates could say the same. Good men - dull men maybe, but good men - had been transferred out to other ships and bases, given leave, or detached on unspecified duties, leaving Oyadan far below complement.

New men had been attached, some of whom he knew by reputation, and those reputations were not good.

Slave-drivers, some rumours said that was more than just a figure of speech; theft in the full sense of the term, open, hungry profiteering and bloody-minded ambition.  
The ship's gunnery officer had dodged three formal charges for lack of evidence, but it was morally certain he had a second career as a hypermatter salesman; the new chief engineer was known to regard multiple redundancy as an opportunity to make several profits on the black market; the deputy chief medic was widely rumoured to dispense more, and more entertaining, drugs than strict medical necessity would allow.

Nguyen was coming to the unpleasant realisation that he had fallen among thieves. Not only that, he had been mistaken by them for one of their own.

As far as he was concerned, his sideline was just that. It did not make him a criminal, didn't affect his essential loyalties. He had met his future wife at agronomy college; his family were medical herb breeders, they did most of their farming with an eyedropper and a pair of tweezers. He hated the idea, endless fiddly little things, constant minute care, and repetitive.

His plan had been to get his bachelor's, then apply to the Imperial Starfleet, try to get into life support if all else failed, but hopefully aim for exobiology, bio-survey work. He had got that far, but the Starfleet, in what passed for wisdom, put him through their own battery of aptitude tests and decided he would make a useful navigator, and trained him as such.

Given the choice of quitting and trying to put his qualifications to use, or going where destiny took him, he had thought about his wife's kinfolk and decided to study hard about this hyperspace thing.

Not that they were bad people, as such; just that there were so incredibly many of them. Carys came from a relatively new- ettled agri-zoned world, big, wide open, more land and work to do than people. They bred big families, which each member in turn - the result was family trees that looked near-horizontal. She had three sisters and five brothers, and the smallest family any of them had married into was four strong.  
If he had known what that meant, at the time…he would still have proposed to her, but with his fingers crossed behind his back. A relatively harmless little scam for the purpose of their care and feeding had landed him in this mess, after all.

What mess? Well, that was where the rumours came in. What had filtered into the public net from personal sources - cameras on Ghorn II, for instance; what of the news reports had made it out before Sector clamped down.

Ferry pilots shooting their mouths off. Private letters, guesswork, inference. Scuttlebutt.

All of the sources said the same unpleasant and all too likely things. Regional force units had found trouble the local force had failed to notice.

There were further rumours of exchanges of fire, even the Moff's cousin killed by regional units - there was less backing that up. On this ship, the dominant feeling was that Region had turned against them.

Who specifically were 'them', though? The galaxy-spanning imperial Starfleet, or this particular collection of rogues, chancers, reprimandees, failures and malcontents? There were entirely too many civilians on board as well, friends and relatives of the moff. A high proportion of them were armed, and he kept trying not to think too loudly, henchman, when he looked at them.

Worst and most dubious of all, the ship's two 'long divisions' - a ten regiment MARDET - had been rotated out, and replacement units had not yet been received on board.

The situation stank, but the worst case scenario couldn't possibly be true. Could it?

That being that the moff was about to go renegade. There widespread rumours of ubiqtorate data raids, missing information, hacker's calling cards left all over the system. Maybe they had something genuinely incriminating to hold against him.  
That and he was going to hijack his own flagship and take it with him, or at least use it to escape prosecution. That would be a truly terrifying prospect. Only slightly worse than having to serve a full commission with this lot, though.

'Pong!' The exec's voice shouted down into the pit. Barbarian, Nguyen thought.

'That's Phong, you walking depleted chromosome,' Nguyen snarled back at him. Mainly to see just how bad things had got, just how much common military courtesy had degraded. Partly to see if the exec actually knew what a chromosome was. 'What do you want?'

'Don't get lippy with me, or I'll exert my authority all over your ass,' the exec would have been happier as a gangland enforcer, in fact Nguyen suspected he had started out that way. 'Where's that goddam course?'

'You mean, the course that this is the first I'm hearing about?' Nguyen said, looking him in the eye and refusing to back down. Commander Urv Eldon was a high-G worlder, a short, wide, heavy, bad-tempered man from a planet of short, wide, heavy men. At one metre sixty-four he was a giant among his people, or would be if they hadn't kicked him out. He probably did qualify as near human, although Nguyen had his doubts about the qualifying prefix. Even though he was a bully at the best of times, this was worse than usual, and he was certainly behaving like a man who felt the bounds of formal discipline loosen.

'Don't get smart with me,' Eldon said.

'Wasted effort,' Nguyen agreed. 'We're deploying at last?'

'Yes,' Eldon said slowly, as if sizing the acting chief nav officer up. Having doubts about, trying to measure, his commitment? If so, commitment to what? Another point in favour of the worst case scenario.

'I have precalculated courses for Ghorn, Corban, the Selezen Cluster,' the rRasfenoni home worlds, 'both mouths of the Run; we can move in thirty seconds, once someone gets their act together well enough to pass on information like - where are we going?' Nguyen said. The Run was the offshoot of the Perlemian that stretched through the sector; the endpoints were a good place to go to intercept fleeing, or arriving, rebels.

The exec threw him a datapad, with unnecessary force, but Nguyen managed to catch it, looked at the numbers, started entering them into the master map; made a rough approximation in his head, didn't believe it. Decided to say nothing while the exec was standing there looking at him - he wanted more time to think.

The emergence point he had been given was nowhere. Empty void, not even a nebula, about fourth on the list of 'most barren and uninteresting places in the sector'. Another pointer in favour of the worst case.

What the kriff did he do if it was that bad?

The bridge door slid open - it was their supreme leader, Moff Edro Vlantir Xeale himself, and a partial entourage: two of his own species, an advisor and a bodyguard. Four humans - two more guards, an older, grey haired man and an eye-candy female medic. Of course, he must still be getting used to his cyberfeet.

Maybe that was the reason he wanted the stormtroopers left behind? Hopefully, but looking at him, Nguyen thought not.  
Ah, dreck, Nguyen thought. If I speak up, I'm screwed. Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong, still bad. If I don't say anything, I'm making myself a traitor by default, maybe. No, probably. I don't want to be a hero, I don't want to have to be a hero. Somebody else say something….no.

Dreck. I hope the pension Carys gets out of this is worth it. Then again, at least I'll be shot of the in-laws.

'Well?' Xeale demanded. 'Are we ready to be on our way?'

Nguyen, standing in the Pit, was at eye-level with a set of metal toes. 'No, your excellency.' Might as well stick to the party line for now, no sense going off too soon. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation.

'I wasn't informed of our destination until a few moments ago. And…' time to put it to the proof, 'I don't understand why we're going there.'

What?' Xeale shouted. It had been a stressful, and painful, week. The cybernetics were the least of his problems. Initially, when the organisation had first come across the potential goldmine of Ord Corban, the political situation here had been delicate and volatile, just after the birth of the Empire. Taking control and making money was not the sort of job one sent a fool to do, and there was such a thing as intelligent corruption, buying into existing large and buying out existing smaller local rivals, discrediting some and co-opting others, who to woo and who to whack. It had been the happiest years of his life, a fresh adventure in grand larceny, manipulation of the law and backstabbing every day.

More recently, as things had stabilised out, the excitement of the job had worn off. Being the undisputed power, with all might legal and illegal, didn't stir the blood as much as the race to the top did.  
He had got complacent - had he also got stupid? Lost his edge, let circumstances creep up on him?

This Kor Alric - he terrified him. Not the personal injury, the sheer willingness and delight in the use of unsubtlety. The privy council? How did a psychotic, a giggling torturer like that become an agent of the privy council? Because he did their will, or at least appeared to. If Adannan was corruptible - and what being was not? - he had moved too fast to give Xeale time to work out what to buy him off with.

Trying to hide the evidence to gain time had got his cousin Ulbin killed. After that, under the threat of superior authority, his supporters and minions, from the subordinate powers of the sector who he had thought he owned body and soul - they had started to desert him.  
More scared of the shadow of Palpatine than of himself.

Now this one, this flyspeck tried to challenge his authority. Xeale snapped, 'It's not your business to understand.'

'Yes, but…' Nguyen swallowed. This did not come easy, challenging the power of a being of the Moff's standing. The empire was very strong on obedience to authority. One of the factors that made it a lot easier for the mid to higher subordinate levels of authority - like a Moff - to go renegade than it was for the groundlings. 'There are certain circumstances,' Nguyen said, 'under which an Imperial officer does have the right to ask for an explanation of his orders.'

'What? Nonsense,' the moff said. 'I am a direct representative of His Imperial Majesty, whose very word is law.'

'Yes, His Majesty's word is law, and I have his signature right here on Chapter 3, Section 5 of the Imperial Military Code of Conduct, by which I ask for a formal explanation,' Nguyen said, more quickly than he had intended. This was trouble now.

'Explain,' the moff turned and asked his aide.

'Receiving an illegal order,' the aide explained. 'Most people aren't aware that provision still exists; it should have been deleted years ago.'

'Who is he?' Xeale asked; the aide fiddled with a datapad, handed it to the Moff.

'Ah. Lieutenant-Commander Phong Nguyen, reprimanded for unauthorised activity, suspected of abusing Imperial property for personal gain, marginal case for consorting with enemies of the state - you are in no position to accuse anyone of acting illegally.'

'Sir, I have a misdemeanour on my record - but if what you're about to do had a straightforward, legitimate explanation, you wouldn't need to resort to blackmail,' Nguyen said.

'How dare you!' Xeale shouted. The two Falleen with him visibly winced, thinking, it's true, resorting to cliché like that, he's losing it.

'There's nothing out there. Empty space. There are no friendlies, no enemies, nothing to go there for; the only reason is if we're running away, which makes your moffship either a deserter or a traitor,' Nguyen stated. He sounded a lot calmer than he felt, but he managed to get the words out.

The reaction in the rest of the bridge crew was interesting. Quite a few of them had only minor blots on their record. They had not been asked, and had not intended, to turn against the Empire.

Everybody missed the fluorescent green line of text appearing incongruously in the middle of a starmap - "That's it. You tell him."

There was no need to persuade this junior officer with the unexpected backbone and streak of honesty. He was going to die, and painfully and humiliatingly, for this. He needed a reasoned argument to soothe and persuade the rest of them. Xeale was not in a generous mood, or in a thinking one for that matter, and did not pitch it quite right.

I am the Sector Governor,' "Moff" was a title Xeale had always found embarrassing, as it was actually a near homonym to one of the most common Falleen slang terms for female pubic hair. By all the gods of theft and deception, though, he would like to hold it a little longer.  
'I am authority here, the trusted friend of His Imperial Majesty, and you are endangering us all by delay. Imperial spacers are dying out there, man. You will plot a course to-' the place really did have no name- 'our destination. Now.'

'Governor,' Nguyen said, 'I am within my rights in asking how what you are doing serves the greater cause of the Empire, that's the whole point of the provision, and if the best you can do is "shut up and soldier", then-'

It was hard to do this, hard to run so directly against authority - and terrible to think that he might be wrong. Part of him had been willing the Falleen to come up with a sensible explanation, some kind of rendezvous, some good excuse to make this not go the way it seemed it was going to have to.

'-With all due respect, my lord - no. I will not accept an illegitimate order, I will not program your voyage to nowhere for you.'

If Xeale had kept his temper and used his glands, he might have got away with it. Nguyen was about as resistant to that influence as any human could reasonably be, having worked with exotic scents and pollens all through his childhood, but no-one was completely resistant.

It could have worked, if he had kept control of his temper. 'Shoot him,' he ordered.

Nguyen had his gun drawn in a flash, but who and what to shoot? No way he could get the moff and all his bodyguards - he flicked the overload dowel out of the service blaster's powerpack with his thumbnail, just before one of the human guards, being of a sadistic streak, shot him in the gut.

That was, in fact, not an unusual response to somebody who actually dared to quote chapter three section five. He heard shouting, swearing, two further shots, a kick in the ribs, then. This is what you get for deciding on a new career as a martyr, he thought dimly, then nothing.

Two junior ratings picked him up and carted him out of the bridge - as well for them, because thirty seconds later, his blaster powerpack blew up, shredding the navigation main and both secondary consoles.

Oyadan was unable to find and activate his presets, and took far too long trying to shift navigation up to the flag bridge.

She was still there, order, counter-order, disorder, when a sister-ship of hers and five smaller craft flashed out of hyperspace on an intercept course, all bearing the winged mace insignia of Fleet Destroyer Squadron 851.

The arrival of Alliance reinforcements was not a surprise, but it was an unpleasant fact. Reiver looked almost undamaged, apart from the splashed-on phoenix emblems, but as she manoeuvred to take in the situation and open up firing arcs, she wasn't handling at peak performance at all. Slow to manoeuvre, slow to open fire, ECM barely credible.

Of course, her computers - once it became obvious that the stormtroopers left on board wouldn't be able to hold her against rebel boarders and her own renegade crew - would have done their best to render her useless to the enemy. They must not have been able to get to the reactor, but if they had managed to blow out the main computer, that would explain a lot.

They rolled to bear, nosed down and opened fire, quickly begun, slowly executed. Their target was Voracious.

There had been no time to swap out the tracer compound; when Caliphant noticed the green turbolaser bolts flashing around his ship, his first thought was that this was a hell of a time for a practical joke.

No, he realised, no-one could be that insane. To fire on a friendly vessel, during combat, for a laugh? No. If it was supposed to be a wakeup call, the only person with authority to do that was Lennart, and he wouldn't be wasting main guns - he would use the LTL, and probably be scoring hits with them.

Glance at the tactical map; it was the new rebel entry, the former-Imperial renegade destroyer. Roll and climb, out of the planetary plane, try to maximise aspect change relative to the battered rebel cruiser and his new opponent both.

'Damn,' he said, after the first ten seconds. Voices were getting shrill - one of the sensor techs was practically screaming his reports, and the helm team were getting spooked by it - he needed to do something to bleed off the tension.

His crew were still looking warily at each other, not entirely certain they could trust each other - and probably rightly so.

He also wondered if what he was going to say was going to fly, or go down like a lead balloon. That was another thing - he couldn't even trust their taste in classic rock.

'When we touch ground,' he said, 'I'm going to chase every woman I see. And I expect to score with at least half of them.'

'How do you work that out?' one of the gunnery deputies asked. At least no-one said "if we get that far."

'Simple. With the size of the streak of luck we must be riding now, I stand a good chance of keeling over from sexual exhaustion.'

That drew venomous glares from the female members of the bridge crew, and nervous laughter from most of the men.

'Really?' the gunnery officer asked, as Voracious kicked under the impact of a heavy turbolaser hit on the port wing from Reiver.

'Well,' Caliphant said, pretending to think about it, 'maybe just five or six.'

'Helm,' he added, 'Fine course is yours. Twenty degrees deviation.' That put helm and nav in charge of not being hit, allowing them to manoeuvre without further orders, up to twenty degrees either side of the base course.

As soon as the rebels figured that out, he would do something else. They were definitely sending a lot of fire his way, hopefully no more than he could keep stunting his way out of.

At that, he was doing better than Lycarin was. Perseverance already had her shields weakened, and now they were taking full advantage of that to try to finish him.

Most of the rebel cruiser's guns were engaging him; Reiver was splitting fire, one turret line on Voracious and one on Perseverance, and Mon Evarra was shooting at all three. The mon cal warship's fire was distinctive; somehow they had managed to get hold of blue and violet tracer. They were purple fireballs exploding off, carving into the Imperial destroyer's shields. She was the most effective.

What to do with her? Lennart thought. As things stood, Perseverance was going to be hounded to destruction. Withdraw her and let her rebuild her shields? In theory, yes, but that would expose the other ships of the squadron. Margins, it was all about margins.

'851-yod-alpha-trey, this is Black Prince Actual.' Lennart commed him, making it an official order. 'Maximum evasion, continue return fire with homing weapons only.  
'Do not, repeat do not, stabilise your course for energy weapon fire. When your shield load reaches eighty-five percent, jump out to RV point Initial. Other units of the squadron, Perseverance is the rebel primary target, use that to get your own shots in. Main priority targets Reiver, Mon Evarra.'

Acknowledgements. Lycarin barely contained anger, knowing that he had been relegated to use as a stalking horse. It was all right for him to be angry, provided he obeyed.

Lennart took a deep breath, thought about what the Alliance plan was. Six against three was bad odds - against four, really, but One and Indivisible was a fortress and a firing platform at this stage, not a mobile warship.

On the other hand, three Imperial groups, apparently inviting defeat in detail, and one of those groups breaking up under fire and scattering in three separate directions. That made them the obvious target. One of the ships, the only one not actually in a state of panic, was the second largest ship in the Imperial force. Primary target, then.

Dordd had been quietly seething at his ship's place in the third wave, unable to give vent to that for the sake of crew confidence. He had settled on a tone of fresh chances; now that the real bad apples were gone, they could get down to work. Don't worry, our time will come, he had said.  
Someone pointed out that that meant most of those left on board must qualify as fake bad apples. Criminal, and fraudulent as well. At least it showed some wit.

Dordd had expected Pel Aldrem to be his biggest problem, ranting and protesting the loudest about the whole business, but he had held his peace - seemed to think it was too late in the day for buggering about.

There had been a few more twisted jokes, one involving selective shutdowns of the artificial gravity system, all good warped fun and essential to the process of not going completely mad. They had tapered off as deployment time came closer.

Aldrem was sweating it out in the confines of battery command, realising he had managed to pitchfork himself into a job which he had never really thought about in sufficient detail.

It was the defensive responsibilities that were mainly worrying him; Dynamic was slow and not very subtle to manoeuvre, her defensive EW was being conducted with one shift on station and the second standing behind them reading out of the ops manuals, and that basically left only the third traditional defensive measure, shoot at the enemy until they went away.

His command staff consisted of himself, Fendon and Suluur doing something close to their normal jobs - electromechanical systems and local control, Jhareylia on comms, the rest of his team in turrets A and B; two local junior lieutenant signal interpreters, the team of console ops under them, including a senior chief offensive EW operator Aldrem was considering as a potential replacement for himself when he moved back to Black Prince. Assuming both ships continued to exist.

They flashed back into realspace - their own sensors instantly duplicating the relayed info from the recon cruiser and flagship, the extra perspective sharpening a few of the ranges and bearings. Targets in front of them - two major rebel warships, several minor - they might as well make an entrance with a bang, even if it wasn't exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

'Main turrets to central battery control,' he announced, over the gunnery systems net. On one hand, it was going to be an unusually difficult shot - calculating the enemy's base course, spotting manoeuvre patterns and EW weaknesses was what central fire control's job was, after all.

On the other hand, it wasn't as if the target had any place being there.

The Imperial third wave announced its presence with a closely grouped salvo zeroed in on the belly of the Quasar Fire corvette-carrier- Dynamic's sensors didn't even have time to match the sensor picture against the registry to find the target's name.

Three bolts missed, six impacted. Well, at least the guns were in working order, and it was always a good way to say hello.

The Quasar Fire and her cargo of rebel fighters detonated, there was screaming on the internal net from the exec that Jhareylia was stalling, some nonsense about fire plans and permission.

Aldrem announced 'Main turrets return to individual control - Com-Scan, gave me course track data on those ships. Let's start establishing some kind of prediction.  
'External line; Gunnery direction Hialaya Karu, this is main battery fire control, Dynamic. My intentions are to lay holding fire from one turret on the MC80, offensive fire from the other pair against Riever. What are your intentions? Over.' And then added, internally, 'Turrets, copy that?'

Two straightforward affirmative grunts from Gendrik and Hruthhal, a nervous, giggly 'acknowledged,' from Banks in turret C.

''Ru, you have Mon Evarra, and power priority. If you find you can't keep her past regen rate, chop back to power parity and target Reiver. Krivin, Lieutenant Banks, target renegade destroyer Reiver. Sensors and engines if possible. You have the master prediction, open fire,' Aldrem said, hoping that he was getting it right.

In theory, the MC-80 was actually the harder target. Less able to give punishment, more able to receive it, slower and slightly less agile - but basically, a fair match for an Imperator-class destroyer. Mon Evarra, in particular, was a slippery one. She was the ship the Alliance had picked to intercept and ambush a crack Imperial destroyer, and had made a fairly good job of it.

Casualties; in their brief close range duel, Black Prince had battered through the rebel ship's shields with close, grouped salvos, started picking off components - she had run the rope out, done as much damage as she could then picked the right moment to go.  
An Imperial defensive victory, but it had been close. How many of their key personnel had Black Prince managed to kill off - were they going to be any easier a target this time?

It took several seconds for Dynamic to compose the full tactical picture and start acting on it - more than enough time for the rebel to get the first shots in.

One of the peculiarities of the Mon Cal; they almost never triple, very rarely mounted twin guns. Single blisters, of whatever they could manufacture or find to hand. That arrangement was better for a fleet melee or a close quarters dodging match, not so good for an open, long range gunnery duel. Which this was - sort of. Medium close.

It meant they needed a lot more gunlayers than a triple, quad, octuple-turret Imperial warship, but it also bred them. Mon Evarra's gun crews were unpleasantly good shots.

Aft and such of the flanks as could bear spat blue and purple shot at both trailing Imperial ships - scoring very quickly, second and third round hits.

But they were shooting at five separate Imperial ships. Spreading their power between all of them, not hitting any hard enough to stand any real chance of burning through.

They knew that, and this was just probing fire, intended to test the targets out, see who would be an easy and who a hard kill.

Reiver had Voracious pinned, and evading her fire - some return fire, they were clearly on the learning curve. The crew of the renegade were not shooting particularly well; they couldn't have transferred gun crews out.

Transferring over even a couple of Mon Evarra's veteran gunlayers, trained in the use of capital turbolasers, would have done wonders for Reiver's shooting. Just as well they hadn't.

The Imperials were about to deprive them of the requirement for fine target selection, anyway. Tevar was about to do something mad.  
Fist was, after all, the largest single ship. Perseverance was in trouble - only footwork was keeping her alive, and if Lycarin had demonstrated more of that earlier, his ship wouldn't be in such trouble now.

Dynamic was displaying unexpected skill with her guns, much more than she was with her engine plant. The mechanics of shielding made it a very bad idea to switch targets in mid-fight. Give an enemy ship the chance to cool off and you threw away all the effort expended so far.  
It made no sense for them to stop shooting at Perseverance; did Lycarin have the sense to execute an escape jump at the right point, what would he do if the rebels did temporarily cease fire?

That was what Tevar would do right now, if she was in their position. Hold fire for a few seconds, long enough to make them think they had a breathing space, then simultaneous concentrated fire from all three rebel capital ships present, burn past the threshold and bring her down.

There was an obvious counter. Her ship's crew would probably hate it.

The fighter swarm was closing the planet fast; too fast for Konstantin Vehrec, who was swearing violently to himself and wishing he had the sense to ride in one of the shuttles or transports as a passenger, where he could be plotting and directing in comfort as a proper raid leader, instead of sweating blood here trying to work out what to do with fifty squadrons.

There was no way he was going to be left out of the saddle for this one, so he was leading from his own personal Avenger. For all the late-model TIE's other qualities it really did not have the electronics for command, leaving him juggling the facts and calculations in his head like a one armed data hanger.

Worse, the rebels really hadn't put up any worthy challenge. The group that had jumped out to intercept them had flown right into the fire of their own planetary heavies, those that had escaped being destroyed had been traumatised and disoriented, easy meat for warship LTL fire.

What there was to be done now was, on the face of it, more bombers' work than fighters'. Given that most of his force consisted of mobile reserve, what did he send down into that thick, stormy atmosphere, and what retain in orbit for full freedom of manoeuvre?

The list of craft that could actually bombard from orbit was short. The assault shuttles with their megaton LTL, escort shuttles with their heavy tail stingers, the bomber-hunter avenger variant TIE Assault with their quad long guns, that was it. In clear air - over a planet whose sky hadn't changed colour with dust and debris - the Starwings, the old twin-gun, bomber wing protoAvengers, /sa Bombers, not much else. The Hunters and /ln could do it in theory, but in practise they and all the old blaster armed craft shed their energy on the way down, just dug holes in the upper atmosphere.

Chance of fighter threat from the planet - theoretical rather than real. If they had been leeching off the Imperial fleet's pilot training programs, they could have a healthy pool of pilots, and enough assembly line space down on the planet to build craft for them, but there was no sign they had realised that potential. Or holding back?

In the defenders' position, he would have reprised their earlier plan, lure the Imperial strike force in, cut them up and cause chaos with point defence fire, then sortie. It would be something to do, at least.

So split the force before the optimum moment, deny them an obvious target.

'Attack stream; shuttles, transporters, Starwings, stay beyond the atmosphere. Clone War fighters and my squadron, upper atmosphere covering party. Other craft, prepare to descend to repulsor altitude and strike planetary defence targets, stand by for targeting orders.' So much for the preparative, now to figure out who to send where.

The strike force spread out, leaving the actual designated attack elements nearest the centre of the ring. Not as many as he had thought, but then again there weren't so many targets, either.

The planet was in terrible shape; they were approaching the side that had taken hits from Black Prince before their shields could be raised - and then so many of the shields blown away. The back side would be more intact, and if the rebs had any sense they would be marshalling there, ready to hit the Imperials as they came over the horizon.

Defensive ESM howled at him; heavy targeters, capital defence guns. Were they so short of light weapons that they had to resort to going after starfighters with four hundred teraton cannon? Or - there was a brilliant crimson flash ahead of them, twenty degrees across; a flak burst. Too soon, they hadn't got the range yet. Crap. Expectable given how good a target the wave of Imperial fighters must make, but still crap.  
The only reasonable counter was to separate further, put so much distance between fighters that it became insupportably wasteful to use heavy shot on them.

'Triple separation. ATRs, torpedoes, dogleg them out, one round each on that turret complex.' A large salvo for a point target, but there would be defences, some would not make it, and anyway overkill was vastly preferable to underkill.

One thing flak bursts could do was swat volatile missiles out of the sky, so send the torps on an almost right angled course out and back in again.

More flak fire. Still short - how often had the rebel gunners ever had a chance to fire a shot in anger? They had fought and won one engagement, so they weren't completely green.

They were struggling with flak fire, though, and most of his charges were well enough shielded to take some flare - the lethal radius of the bursts was much less than it could have been. Small mercies.

'All craft, maximum practical approach speed.' The other obvious move. Better hit atmosphere fast than hang around out here with heavy turbolasers taking potshots at them.

There was a beep on command channel, the helmet speakers making it sound like it came from behind him. Equal-rank or subordinate commanders' voices would have seemed to come from beside or slightly forward, juniors from increasingly far in front. In dogfight mode, the voices would be set to sound as if they were from the direction they were actually in. Ergonomics in action.

'Vehrec? Lennart.' It was a broadcast over the swarm to prevent him being fingered as the commander; the other fighters' com units would have tuned them out at that point.

'Your clone war fighters are committed, but have the rest calculate standby courses out to reinforce the main battle. The last remaining rebel heavy's on her way in and - wait one.'

HIMS Fist was taking heavy fire; she was the obvious target for the rebels, and Tevar was doing a good job of sidestepping it - but one of her evasion turns went further than just footwork, as the bare-metal patched bow swung round to point between Reiver and Mon Evarra.

They had to be got rid of, and that meant doing something about them, now. She made her decision calmly, looking at the main tactical board - somehow that seemed to divorce the situation, just coloured light on a wall.

If she could have looked out of her bridge window and seen stars, it would have occurred to her that this was nuts.

One turret line bore on Reiver, the other on Mon Evarra. Fist commenced rapid sequential, the inboard gun in each battery forward to aft, eighth of a second apart, then outboard, forward to aft, two continuous lines of green tracer and glowing red ion bolt, and the engines flared as the destroyer accelerated up to three thousand 'g'.

The rebel ships fire pattern didn't change; they didn't think they needed to. If the Imperials were going to try rebel tactics for once, press to close quarters and fire both sides, that suited them - they thought.

Perseverance was still their first priority; kill her, then turn on the charging Fist.

The rebels sent streams of red, green and purple fire after the Vic-III, scoring hits - Mon Evarra accounting for about half of them - scorching her and driving shield integrity down. Two minutes to failure, three if they were lucky.

'Awesome weight of fire,' Lennart said waving a hand at the image of One and Indivisible, 'just as well they can't shoot to save themselves. Signals, any idea where Alliance command actually is? The Lucrehulk isn't the flag, just the manoeuvre element?'

One and Indivisible was taking hits - a few missiles from Perseverance's twenty-round salvos had got through, mainly flying past to the blind side and detonating there.

Voracious was making relatively good practise pounding away at the wallowing cruiser, Hialaya Karu's first shots had been placed there - an easy target to start with. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

'Believe so, Captain,' Rythanor confirmed. 'No decodes yet, but traffic analysis' best guess is that Admonisher is senior officer.'

'So their largest ship, their highest rank, and their most battle-experienced crew are in three different places. Not brilliant. And damn Tevar, that was my plan C. Engineering? If we do a five second bounce, will anything fall off?'

The only reason Mirannon didn't scream at him was that he suspected there wasn't time. 'Go bradyonic, give and take fire, jump back to lightspeed? Definitely shock damage, possibly to the stasis systems. Unless it's life and death it's not worth the risk.'

'The second step would be a microjump,' Lennart admitted.

'If I lose the stasis curve we'll get about, oh, two point seven million years older during the second transition to lightspeed. That is an estimate I have no intention whatever of refining,' Mirannon stated, flatly.

'No possibility of a safe transition?'

'Not two flash transitions that close together - manual says five hundred seconds. I reckon sixty, marginal, high risk. Not five. Is it actually life and death?'

'Not for us. Lycarin, maybe,' Lennart admitted.

'Not worth it,' Mirannon opined. Privately, Lennart agreed with him - the man wasn't worth it, but the ship and the crew deserved better.

'We probably will be doing a bounce, then,' Lennart advised, and dropped the link. It was a tactical option, and he had known, really, a daft one. Had to ask, though. 'So much for plan C.'

If they had jumped in to support Fist, between the two rebel ships, Admonisher would have followed them, and it was hard to think of a position the rebels would like more to find the Imperial flagship in than that. If he was going to do that, he needed to be able to get out fast.

'Nav- there.' A supporting position, just right for crossfire against Reiver; the apparent first position. 'Bounce and circle to - there.' The second, real, re-entry point was a light second astern.  
Second order; Admonisher would expect them to bounce, so the rebel ship's true drop point would be calculated on that basis. So move a step past that, and ambush the ambush.

'Laid in, skipper,' Brenn reported.

'Right. Signals, tell Perseverance to get out now, move to RV Initial, cool off, then rejoin. Nav, take us in.'

The rebel fire was starting to zero in on Fist; Were they - yes, they were making the mistake of leaving an already pounded ship, shields burnt thin, to escape and regenerate. Or at least, it looked that way.

Fire on Perseverance had slackened to basically light and mediums; Lycarin, now, was reluctant to go. Anger and wounded pride combined with a possible tactical opportunity. She turned back into the attack.

Lennart managed to stop himself screaming at the display; it would have done little good. He would be better off doing the same to the man himself. 'Signals, Perseverance. Lycarin, what the kriff are you doing?'

The informality and unprofessionality did not serve as any kind of signal at all. Lycarin ignored his commander's obvious intent.

'I'm attacking. The rebs hit us hard early on, nearly took us out of the fight. I admit that - but my people can't stand it any more, taking fire and giving nothing. They've had enough - I've had enough. We need to shoot back.'

'Not in that bloody silly way, man.' He had made the same mistake again - assuming that it was necessary to hold a relatively straight and stable course in order to fire effectively.

'Manoeuvre, kriff it, zig-zag, your ship has turrets for a reason. Twenty degrees either side of a base course twenty-five degrees off the bearing of the target at least. Do it now. Lennart out.'

'Scan, what are One and Indivisible's turrets doing? Doesn't look like their full weight of fire they're putting against Fist.'

'No, skipper, it isn't. Half the turrets are holding fire, still tracking Perseverance.'

Crap. To give an order and then contradict it two seconds later - Lycarin would be at least, confused. Order, counter order, disorder - micromanagement as the golden road to failure. Time and timing, the bane of all their lives - too much happening too fast, too soon - the usual cry of the defeated. Lots of things happening very fast, the more you can make happen to the enemy the better, and the first to let it get on top of him and fall behind the curve was the first bound for defeat.

Lennart thought he was doing a moderately good job so far, but definitely not brilliant - supervising them enough to cramp their own initiative, not enough to prevent all their mistakes. Witness Lycarin, who definitely was making a mistake, and Tevar, who was taking a calculated risk that Lennart, at least, would not.

Fist's fire was scoring, pounding away on the shielding of both ships - and what little fire the rebels could spare aft was zeroing in on Dynamic, who was evading gently, and doing some deadly accurate shooting.

Dordd could afford to be much more radical than that without spoiling Aldrem's aim; that must be all his helm team could cope with. Still, between them, Dynamic and Fist against Reiver and Mon Evarra- almost a fair fight, close enough for jazz anyway.

'Hialaya Karu, we need more pressure on One and Indivisible. She's your primary target,' Lennart ordered, then 'Signals, pass our images of One and Indivisible's turret setup to Perseverance, flagged urgent. And find me his exec's file.'

Falldess was starting to enjoy herself. There were enough of the crew of Tarazed Meridian with her to fill most of the offensively important jobs, and the bulk of the dead weight was in damage control. Six prime and six secondary crews for single thirty- teraton turbolasers stretched across ten twin sixty-five teraton turrets - not exactly familiar with the weapons, but they had a relatively easy target to start off with.

One and Indivisible was wallowing. Perfect. Hialaya Karu banked graciously into a wide sweeping turn, generating lateral velocity and pivoting to keep the alpha arc open, laid down a long ripple of fire into the rebel cruiser.

Some hits - green flashes off the hull - but if the catastrophic loss of one of their main arms hadn't been enough, then she was going to have to be beaten to death.

Falldess looked around for further targets to engage; the lighter rebel elements were scattering and trading fire with the Imperial escort ships, both basically irrelevances - Light Forces Wave One were on their way to besiege one of the larger giants' moons, Light Forces Wave Two were laying fire on Reiver and Mon Evarra - and taking losses from the rebel cruiser's lighter guns - Light Forces Wave Three were adding to the basket.

Play it out. Ride the decisions down. Fist was in this for death or glory - who was it who had said "Never mind manoeuvres - always go at them"?

Voracious was worrying away at the maimed rebel cruiser, taking hits but giving better than she got; Dynamic's shooting eye was in, but force help her when the rebels decided to make her their primary target. The last rebel heavy was on her way inbound, chasing the last Imperial heavy in the area.

Two complicated flashes of white light, and the sensor picture fuzzed as the computers tried to work out exactly what had happened; and one brilliant flare of red.

Black Prince had made her false entry, the rebel ship had appeared to follow; the Imperial ship had flown her ring manoeuvre, emerged behind Admonisher - and the rebel ship had been clever too.

She hadn't quite predicted the actual endpoint, but had expected trickery - she emerged half a light second out and off on the flank, impossible for Black Prince to get between her and the lighter Imperial ships.

And, of course, the rebels had marked Lycarin down for a fool, and monitored Black Prince's command-circuit calls. They had no decodes either, but every time he was yelled at, Perseverance did something smarter.

The obvious time to lower the boom on him, fire the closely grouped salvo that would burn through his shielding and smash into his hull, was when Black Prince was in her state of transition.

The flag might react quickly enough to pass Lycarin a warning, but left to his own devices, he would take too long to make up his mind. Fatally long. In her erratic, ill-matched weapon galleries, One and Indivisible still carried enough guns to put out seven petatons a second. By the time Lycarin had finished panicking, her shields were gone - and it was the exec who gave the word to make transition, get out of here.

The rebels tracked the vulnerable destroyer as she managed to turn to escape vector and begin acceleration, pursuing, smashing and splintering the armoured hull, burning away the bow, port main turret line, most of sublight engines, carving deep into the superstructure.  
One shot punched through the bridge module. Nav computers melted - along with everything else, including Lycarin and far too many of his crew. Transit aborted - a small mercy for the crew who otherwise would have died as their ship tore itself apart without benefit of working tensor and stasis fields.

The reactor let go, most of the starboard turret line blew up in electrical explosions under the surge.

Perseverance was, to all practical intents and purposes, destroyed. A tumbling wreck, molten-hot, with a handful of fortunate escape pods, remained.

Five to four odds, now. In terms of tonnage, closer to four to one against.

Bloody idiot, Lennart thought, cursing Lycarin for getting himself killed - then stopped himself. No, he decided, I will not waste time and optimism second guessing myself, not now when all's still to do.

'Gunnery, let's see if that bastard's as slick as he thinks he is. Target Admonisher, sequential turret salvos, fire.'


	39. Chapter 39

The rebel fire pattern projected through time was an instructive sight. Mon Evarra had entered spitting violet tracer in all directions, scattering fire across the Imperial squadron. She had rapidly found herself forced to reduce her horizons to the closest, between the three - now two - ships almost directly in front of her, and then everything that could be brought to bear on one.  
That would be Captain Tevar's Fist, accelerating towards the rebel pair - thirty thousand kilometres distant and accelerating at thirty kilometres per second per second.

Reiver's gunnery was mediocre. Her crew had surrendered, not defected - few of them must have been willing to serve the Alliance to Restore the Republic. She was not truly capable of living up to the standard expected from a line destroyer.  
Tevar had effectively bet her ship's life - and her own - on that. The rebel MC-80 was doing her best to prove the Imperial captain wrong.

'Aldrem?' Dordd com'd his temporary main battery commander. 'Tactical assessment.'

'If they were all that was in it, Fist would be able to take Reiver with shielding to spare - Reiver's on a scratch crew,' Aldrem said, and thought through the permutations.

'Ourselves against Mon Evarra - I can put the fire in, but helm control can't stop them hitting us back. Probably going to be a mutual, them and us both crippled if not hulked outright.  
'Our best option is to go for the easy meat first, help Fist put down Reiver then turn on Mon Evarra. Captain, their best option is to focus on us. If they combine fire and finish us off, they can move on to Fist, and roll up the Imperial line from there, move in and establish local superiority in one fight after another,' Aldrem pointed out.

That was, if anything, an optimistic assessment of the situation, Dordd thought. Single ship against single ship, Fist would take Reiver down, but take enough heat doing it to be at a real disadvantage in further combat. Dynamic against Mon Evarra, he didn't actually expect to be able to do that well. Much as it hurt to admit it, the probable result between a well-armed ship with minimal footwork and electronic deception and a well armed ship that could sidestep punishment was just too obvious. They would be able to hurt the rebel 'cruiser', but not badly enough to bring her within Fist's reach. The most likely aggregate result was the destruction of both Imperial starships and the renegade star destroyer and severe damage to Mon Evarra, leaving her hurt too badly for further combat immediately, but not too much to limp away and fight another day.

That would constitute a rebel victory. Mon Evarra could work that out, but Reiver?

'Except that Fist is making too direct a challenge for that - she has most of their attention,' Dordd said, then did something else he wasn't supposed to do - discussed an officer of equal or superior rank with a junior.

'Do you think Captain Tevar has fully integrated that factor in a bold but balanced plan based on the psychological impact of relentless aggression, or-'

'Did injured unit and local pride decide her into charging straight down their throats?' Aldrem finished the captain's sentence for him. 'Sometimes "Banzai" does constitute a plan - but ask me again when you're writing up the after action report.'

'One thing, though,' Aldrem added, 'I don't think a crack ship like Mon Evarra is going to be that easily rattled; they can do the numbers as well as we can.'

Looking at his own fire plan, it had been overtaken by circumstances, so on the gunnery net he said 'Eddaru, Reiver's now main target, drop back to power parity and point on.' At the hit rate they had been getting, the only real point was to obfuscate the Imperial plan, and the time for that was well past.

'So why aren't they shooting at - commence maximum evasion now,' Dordd wondered, then turned round and snapped out the order to his helm team. Motion compensation was managed from battery control, which at the moment meant Aldrem, he resisted the urge to swear, then decided to give in to it anyway.

Dynamic surged forward, porpoised and pulled a 270 degree turn to starboard; the volley of shot from Mon Evarra splashed around them landing two hits out of the thirty-five that could bear.

It was possible to return snapshots only, as Dynamic's drastic motion carried Reiver into and out of her fire arc, and they did, Hruthhal and Gendrik scoring once or twice, Banks slightly wild, firing too soon and keeping firing after the target had gone - but getting close and landing one hit, not bad for a novice.

Aldrem and Captain Dordd were both thinking the same thing; as soon as they stabilised out from full evasion or at least started to show a predictable pattern, Mon Evarra would lob a couple of converged sheaves at them trying for the cheap kill. She was keeping a light, open fire on them anyway, hitting worryingly often with her lighter guns.

Was the time they gained for Fist by diverting the Mon Cal cruiser's fire worth more than the hits they could land? Both men came to the same conclusion: no.

'Helm,' Dordd gave the preparatory order, 'stand by to steady down to 750 'g' evasive, then one point two seconds later, diving corkscrew right, maximum evasive power.'

'Then reverse left, four hundred seventy milliseconds later - as a suggestion,' Aldrem added.

'Do it,' Dordd ordered.

As both of them had been expecting, Mon Evarra waited to see if the move was genuine, then fired a narrow spread at their predicted position - reversing the turn took Dynamic out of most of the fire pattern, not all. Five hits forward, around the secondary reactor- damage the shields, but nothing penetrated, not close enough together for that. They made two more attempts, one that landed another pair of hits, one that missed entirely.

So we can survive their fire, Dordd thought, at the price of taking ourselves virtually out of the fight - too unstable a gun platform. It's a miracle they can score hits at all, but we can't hold on target long enough to get the hit rate to burn down a Mon Cal's shields - and it costs us more energy to evade than it does her to keep us evading. If this goes on long enough, she'll economise us to death. In the extremely unlikely event that it does last that long.

Mon Evarra knew the numbers too, realised how little she was achieving, checked fire on Dynamic, and turned the bulk of her fire back on to Fist.

So now the situation was relatively clear. Both rebel ships concentrating on Fist, who was still splitting her fire between two targets, one turret line on each; the Mon Cal was playing bullfighter, offensively, insultingly small little sideslips and weaves, ducking and dancing out of the line of fire - there were hits, but not in proportion.

Tevar had four years' seniority. Dordd had a week. He could only advise.

'Captain Tevar,' he com'd to Fist, 'this is Captain Dordd, Dynamic Actual. Our analysis suggests concentration on a single target.'

She thought about that for a second. Dordd's shiphandling performance had been…unimpressive. Gunnery excellent, but the fact that the flagship had had to detach a specialist to supervise didn't mean he could get credit for that. What he was saying did make first-order sense, but -

'Captain Dordd, if we withdraw fire from Reiver then that gives her a free shot at us, she can vastly increase her hit rate.'

'I know,' Dordd said. 'Mon Evarra is the one you should leave to last.'

'That doesn't make sense,' Tevar said. 'She's a smaller ship, less powerful, she should be an easier kill.' And, indeed, by the usual Imperial reckoning, that was perfectly true. Mon Cal cruisers could take a beating, but usually, if attacked boldly and directly, an Imperator's superior attack could overcome the Mon Cal's superior defence before the Mon Cal's mediocre offence could break through an Imperator's above-average defence.

On the other hand, the damned thing was still there, and the scanner picture was confusing - so many antenna and so much computer power down, they were at an EW disadvantage. It was possible that the Rebel was deliberately running her shields hot, trying to convince them that they were doing better than they were, luring them into firing at a target that could take it and away from one that couldn't.

To her own bridge crew she asked, 'Gunnery, what hit rate are we actually getting on that ship?'

'Fist Actual, this is main battery direction Dynamic,' Aldrem decided to intervene. 'I know Mon Evarra well; she's a crack ship, and she is fooling you. She has primary responsibility for the destruction of HIMS Lamprey, damage credit on three other Imperial destroyers. She's simulating a hit rate of twenty percent; I'm watching your tracers fly by on the other side, you're getting a quarter of that.'

'Gunnery? Is that feasible? Com-Scan?'

'Com-Scan, trace their fire back,' her gunnery officer suggested.

Ah, Tevar thought. 'Helm, Gunnery, we will be rolling to open alpha arc on Reiver, combat systems, focus shields sixty-forty against Mon Evarra once the roll is complete. Begin roll. Com-scan?'

'I'm sorry, Captain, I can't believe I forgot to do that,' her chief scan officer reported. 'They've been playing us for fools. The positions we're registering impact flares in are not the positions they're firing from, their EW's been running us in circles.'

'If that's true, we haven't even heated them beyond dissipation rate,' Gunnery admitted. 'Firing on Reiver now.'

And if that is the case, Tevar thought, then once we have brought Reiver down, then we still have the most difficult opponent to go. Although now, at least, the situation was clear.  
Both Rebel ships concentrating on Fist, both Imperial ships concentrating on Reiver, first loss would leave the survivor facing odds of two to one.

'Why not us?' Dordd wondered. 'Why aren't they shooting at us?'

'Try this scenario, Captain.' Aldrem offered. 'Mon Evarra picks that fight with us, manages to burn through Black Prince's shielding and do some damage, we conduct a successful rescue under fire and do some damage in return, minor victory on both sides. The rebs don't get that many of those. Mon Evarra's captain gets bumped up the ladder, leaving her executive officer in charge - who is junior to whoever from the base command here has Reiver now.  
'Mon Evarra's too good a ship to miss a trick like that, the only reason I can think of is if they were overruled by a senior officer - ordered to concentrate fire on the flagship's target.'

'If you're right about that,' Dordd said, 'then where's Mon Evarra's former captain?' Tactically, that sounded right for what they were seeing - the down side of republican military virtue. Fire had continued while they were speaking, of course.

'Best guess?' Aldrem said. 'Admonisher.'

Lennart had brought Black Prince out of hyperspace astern and half a light second distant from the Clone War heavy destroyer and opened fire at once; Admonisher had taken a split second longer to react, but no more than that. She chose to take the hit, and return it with interest.

The Rebel ship carried the same DBY-827 heavy turbolasers as the Venator, but mounted them very differently; eight groups of three quadruple turrets, ninety-six barrels and half as much energy again to put through each of them, shielding and electronics to match, and larger, more heavily armoured and more damage resistant. They carried a large fighter complement, too, sixty squadrons which had also come in in hyperspace and were deploying now.

They did have one drawback - two, counting the crew requirement. They were the upper end of destroyer classification, heavy and slow. In theory, Black Prince should be significantly better at the footwork. She would have to be, with up to ninety-six heavy turbolasers pointed at her. Actually, Admonisher wasn't fool enough for that.

She had a very small alpha arc, a five degree cone around the bow; that would have restricted her evasion to the point where she would be taking more hits than the fire of the two ventral batteries was worth.

Instead, the heavy destroyer dipped her bow, exposing the six dorsal batteries, and commenced return fire.  
Black Prince's first full volley was accurate, slamming into the dorsal central shields, burning into but not quite through the shielding; two would have done so, but Lennart didn't think he would be given the opportunity to get a second full shot off, and he was right.

The Imperial destroyer rolled on to closing course in the same relative attitude, battery to battery, and accelerated towards the rebel, twisting to sidestep the rebel's battery salvos - one of them hit the forward starboard side of the superstructure. Not quite a shield penetration, close but not enough. Two would have been.

'Well, we outpointed her four to one,' Lennart said, tracing a course track in the tactical tank as he spoke. 'Guns, salvos by half battery, axials independent, ripple.'

Every sixth of a second, each battery would have its turrets fire one of their subassemblies, the four half batteries alternating with the heavy axials, a continuous string of half-petaton shot or salvos of shot. The veteran destroyer's helm team and defensive EW would try to prevent it looking as if there was a pattern, keep them guessing, try to force them to fire at an area rather than a point target - and the Admonisher would be doing the same to them, of course.

The base courses each of them ought to take up were obvious; the rebels to close on the four-ship main destroyer action to take art in that, the Imperial ship to move outwards onto the rebel's stern aspect for the easiest and most effective shot.

So much so that, naturally, both of them decided to do something other than the predictable.

The rebel had been aiming 'down', below the ecliptic plane; she changed course by eighty degrees, aiming to skim along below it, closing at a shallow angle and not quite maximising aspect change - not the most optimal move, but the most optimal move was also one of the most easily anticipated.  
Black Prince, in contrast, feinted outwards, drew a full salvo, rolled and darted inwards in an erratic zig-zag, wildly varying thrust and scattering rebel shot ahead and astern of her.

Force be damned, Lennart thought, this is prediction, urgent, immediate, detailed and absolutely vital. The thought occurred to him that he should have challenged Adannan to a contest of effective foresight; give him tactical control of something and whoever gets hit less often, wins. Wouldn't have worked; there was nothing to use as a stake that was cheap enough, in military potential and life hazarded, to be worth the risk of losing.

Maybe I am being too hard on the Force, Lennart realised; there was more than enough evidence that a skilled Jedi really could perceive, analyse and react faster than an ordinary human - but for this, Lennart thought, I'll be damned if Adannan can.  
Come to think of it, if we have a moment or two to breathe - unlikely until this is over - I could make worse use of it than trying to predict him, and what he's up to. If we get that moment.

The first clash was an Imperial victory on points, Black Prince had landed more hits - but there was no pause, just enough elapsed time for a reassessment of decisions made.

Admonisher chose to hold her course and ride out the possibilities. Black Prince - and Lennart felt as if it was the ship, that the deck under his feet and the mottled bow stretching out ahead were making the choice, not him - she chose to bring Admonisher closer to the centre of the alpha arc, head relatively directly for her now, to buy distance that could be used to be more of a crossing target later if the probabilities turned sour.

How long is a decision cycle? Five seconds, less? Long enough for something as fast and powerful as an Imperial destroyer to inflict terrible damage - or have it inflicted.  
There was no room for mistakes, barely enough to pretend to make them in order to deceive. Admonisher was good, almost too good for a ship that had only just entered the fight and hadn't really shaken down. They would improve as they warmed up- not a good thought.

Vehrec's fighters were coming out of the gauntlet, approaching the planet now. The flak bursts had given up - one turret and probably central control knocked out by the heavy warheads, and the lighter defence batteries had achieved little.

The rebels really did seem to have almost nothing left in the way of fighters, and what little had come up to meet them had been sent tumbling back down again in short order. Personally, Vehrec had bagged one single, solitary Z-95. One measly outdated snubfighter.

He was just deciding to leave the non-hyper capable fighters behind and go in search of more interesting prey than a pounded planet when the situation changed. Half of Admonisher's fighter wing, visible in the distance, seemed to turn towards them and prepare for microjump - five squadrons of Y-wings, eight squadrons of Z-95s, six of A-wings and eleven of X-wings.

That and, down on the nightside of the planet, one of the shield domes flickered out, revealing a small horde - maybe another ten to fifteen squadrons - of fighter and transport grade signatures, which started to climb for orbit.

LTL fire from the assault shuttles - and two of the Starwings, since when were they heavy gun fighters? - managed to kill the shield generator and started raking the hangars, there was a massive secondary explosion when an ordnance dump went up, that was a start. This was much more like it.  
Three divisions; the old booster-ring fighters, the shuttles and transports, and the modern fighters and fighter-bombers. Division two could stay on the rebels coming up from the planet, division one would move to englobe the most likely rebel drop point, division three would stay in high orbit for the moment and react as things happened.

He gave the orders accordingly; the Admonisher's fighter group made a high exit, five planetary diameters off - too far for direct support. Conservative navigation - unlikely from the Alliance - or simply missed timing, something else that was supposed to happen but didn't?

Anyway, the assault and escort shuttles were having a field day. First light turbolasers and area defence lasers reaching down deep into the atmosphere, then the JV-7's forward guns and the Lambdas' conventional guns coming into play as the rebels cleared the thick lower air - and the transports had heavy antiship torpedoes. Not many of the escaping rebel small craft had enough shielding to withstand one, and the Alliance fighters were spending most of their energy in defending their own transports, shooting the arrows not the archer - and the predictability of having to do that made them easy targets in turn.

Still debatable whether enough of them would make it to orbit and disrupt the Imperial formation, softening them up in time for Admonisher's fighters to attack. Well, things are definitely looking up, Vehrec thought. Looks like I'm going to get that fight after all.

Voracious and Hialaya Karu were making excellent practise pounding heat into One and Indivisible; excellent, that was, for an essentially immobile, very large and very obvious target.

In a way, it didn't matter; One and Indivisible couldn't really contribute to a rebel victory any more, she couldn't manoeuvre, could just about turn to bear, but could take no creative part in the battle.  
What she could do was maul the living daylights out of any Imperial ship careless enough to assume that she was out of it. She had to be put down, and as fast as possible to release the two Imperial light destroyers to other targets.

One and Indivisible's fighter complement might have something to say about that, though. At last they were starting to emerge in numbers, and a very odd lot they were too. A real zoo of the modern and ancient, B- and Y-wing bombers and fighter-bombers, some X-wings, and handfuls of a dozen other types including PTB625, Starhammers, Torrents, Tri-fighters and Nimbus, Cords and Stingers, all the variety of the third rate - even a single flight of Aurek fighters; the design was four thousand years old.

'That must make servicing and maintenance a pain in the ass - let's take some of the load off them,' Caliphant decided - not that he really had an option, as Voracious was the closest large target and where they seemed to be heading anyway.

Did he trust any of his gunners to be able to do flak fire? No, not really.

'Warn the fighter wing, establish an LTL clear fire corridor and open fire, target bomber-types first. Torps…' he thought about it. The torpedo control crew had done well so far. 'Do you think you can burst a salvo in amongst the rebel fighter stream, get them with blast effect?'

'Not straight up, Sir. We'll have to get fancy,' they said, sounding highly dubious - as well they might because it was extremely unlikely.

'Do it,' Caliphant ordered. Main gun fire continued throughout, splattering One and Indivisible's shielding, and what was left of the rebel cruiser was returning fire from everything that could bear, surrounding Voracious in fire, but it was poorly coordinated, largely under local control, and spraying wild.  
It was tense, jittery work staying ahead of their targeting teams, being one step ahead for all of five hundred or a thousand steps, and time was on the larger ship's side usually. Bulk was survivability, which gave time, stress and chances for the smaller ship to make a mistake.

Voracious had already nearly made several - presenting her main battery for a sustained burst of fire and taking half a second too long to move back to evasive. Fortunately, the lighter guns tracked faster than the heavier, ten hits but all from thirty and forty teraton weapons. Not much, considering.

The rebels were still mostly firing broad area salvos, covering an area - landing a few hits, they had the power available to manage that much, and they were slowly burning through the shielding, but nothing like as bad as it could have been if they had been able to concentrate fire on a point target. Force knew what structural strain was being caused to Voracious by continual hard evasion burns, but it was better than taking the hits they would otherwise.

One and Indivisible really needed her fighters to pin Voracious in place and make her an easier target for the main guns, but Voraciousstill had most of the fighter complement of wave two to work with, as well as whatever tricks she could manage.

Strange that ships were still usually referred to as female, despite - no, because of - the majority of crews and commanders being male; although merchant ships frequently were referred to as 'it', no more than they deserved.

The fighter waves edged towards each other, homogeneous cloud of mainly TIE/ln Fighters and /sa Bombers on one side, history's dustbin on the other, the first flares of heavy guns and long range warheads reached out, and the surprise.  
Voracious' torpedo launchers had cold-launched one salvo and had them under command guidance - dog-legged them through their own fighter support for cover. Two near collisions, one actual collision between two TIEs trying to get out of the way, and one near disaster when one of their hothead advanced-trainee volunteers shot one, and fortunately for all concerned failed to detonate it.

The other three picked their way to the forward edge of the Imperial swarm, then lunged forwards under cover of what jamming the destroyer and the fighters could provide for them. One was picked off at range, bursting in a blue-white fireball that cooled to red at the core; the other two were not successfully shot.  
Surprise, tactical novelty - interacting factors, so many of the rebels being unable to believe and react effectively to the Empire pulling something out of the hat for once - and above all jamming.

Both the torpedoes fireballed in the rebel swarm. Heavy ship killers, at least equivalent to an HTL shot and more effective at translating that power into structural damage - the largest and heaviest rebel fighters were also the slowest and least able to get out of the blast wave.

Those not destroyed were still damaged and disoriented enough for Voracious' light turbolasers to do their job for once, picking off the B's, Y's, Starhammers and the old patrol bombers, and as the Imperial forces tore into the disorganised rebels, it was doubtful whether the rebels would have enough of anything left to threaten Voracious.

Now it mattered whether or not the Imperial fighters could punch a big enough hole in the rebel flight groups to let their bombers through to release on One and Indivisible.

Admonisher was keeping her dorsal batteries on the Imperial flagship, which left the two ventral turret clusters to find what targets and do what damage they may - and that was Dynamic and Hialaya Karu.  
Both ships had to manoeuvre with respect to the big rebel destroyer now and pay her more electronic attention - neither ship was under significant fire from any other rebel, so it was unlikely to be decisive, at least not quickly. Unless the other rebel ships took their flagship's lead.

The situation was still volatile, and the Empire was ahead on points - half a planet and half a cruiser, and numerous smaller craft, was more than a fair trade for a light destroyer, however much they felt it could have been avoided. It hadn't, and that was that.

There was still more than enough potential for the situation to change. If I make a major error that leaves Admonisher free to engage another target, Lennart thought, them she could roll up the rest of the Imperial force.  
Conversely, if they make that mistake then I could do the same, he added. That was why both flagships had chosen each other as targets.

What was left to manoeuvre with, anything that could be withdrawn from other places and committed where it was needed? Detached Forces wave One, it was time to reattach.

They had hit one of the moons of Corban-III, a resource extraction site, blown out the lighter shields and battered down the defences, collapsed the envirodomes pinning what rebels were left alive in the subsurface workings for later assault and extraction.  
Gas mining platforms in the atmosphere of the giant, strafed and some were burning - one had fusion-fireballed - but the other moon of importance had its shields up, and there were numerous smaller targets throughout the moon and ring system.

'Signals, record for transmission - helm, roll out rather than counteryaw - "Light forces wave one, engage-' a line around the area on the tactical map - 'these targets from your present position. Medium intensity fire plan, do not conduct mop up operations.  
'Once the initial fire plan is complete, make a tactical hyperjump to positions-' another, much smaller, oval on the tactical map- 'target Mon Evarra and conduct harassing fire." Right, transmit that. And light forces wave two, your assessment of the situation?' Lennart added and mentally kicked himself for it. Too much the teacher yet, wanting them to think it through and realise for themselves what had to be done when he should simply have snapped out the order.

It was Raesene who came back with the right answer anyway. 'You want us to move in closer on One and Indivisible and try to finish her off more quickly?'

'She's just going to keep rolling to present her active shields and weapons to the destroyers; the frigates can englobe her and try for the core ship,' Lennart confirmed. 'Do it.' He would have given a more detailed order if there had been time, felt guilty about not doing so, but Admonisher was pressing them too hard.

The light forces of wave two had been circling like exceptionally heavily armed vultures, adding what heavy and medium guns they had to the fire raking One and Indivisible. It was their safest and surest use, and given what was happening elsewhere in the battle none of them were surprised to be called upon to do something more demanding and dangerous.

What else was there not being used to the fullest, what was there to manoeuvre with? Light forces wave three, Dynamic's and Hialaya Karu's escort, had local ascendancy - an Illustris, numerous strike cruisers and lighter ships, it would have been strange if they hadn't. There was an escort carrier burning, the rebels had got that far, but no major loss.  
Brenn, Rythanor and the rest of the bridge team had been handling the ship while he gave orders to the squadron, and doing not too badly although they had taken a couple of hits Lennart was sure he could have avoided.

Admonisher was handling well, strangely flat at the moment though - 'Helm, pitch up to port, five hundred, one point five seconds roll inverted, dive port seven hundred.' A specific evasion order in response to a specific move on behalf of the enemy; Admonisher rolling to present her alpha arc in order to inspire Black Prince into a radical and predictable full power evasion.

Lennart refused to react that far - and hoped Admonisher's captain hadn't guessed that far ahead as well. Black Prince's relatively gentle evasion turn was met with a full salvo anyway, which flashed past within a thousand metres of the point where the Imperial destroyer had rolled inverted.

'Gunnery, full converged sheaf,' dot on the map, 'there.'

The main guns crashed out together, shield control started to scream about something, and Lennart glanced at engineering-liaison to see the main reactor seemed to have been taken off line. Had they been hit in that last burst - and much harder than Lennart thought? Sixth sense, intuition, the feel of the ship around him said no, and it also said a full power bank to starboard would be a good idea.

He measured out the order trying to look confident and reassuring, then there was an almighty thump, the lights and gravity went out, most of the bridge crew swore by the gods of excrement, and there was a magnificent multi-hued green fireball off in the distance beyond the bridge windows.

'Execute,' Lennart confirmed the order to helm control, and to gunner,y 'Again once, then previous routine.' The flicker-crash of their own rounds out, and then back to normal, insofar as this maelstrom could be called normal.

'Skipper, gunnery. I think we blew his forward upper shields out,' Wathavrah reported.

'He'll make a slow turn to port, her new base course is going to be 336 negative 8, adjust fire plan accordingly,' Lennart said, mind too buzzing to say 'nice shot', but his tone did it for him.

He was thinking about what he would do with damage like that, with no head-on shielding and some damage to the bow, how he would nurse his own ship. First order, after a shock like that it would take them all time, which he needed himself.

'Engineering,' the com unit connected him, 'Gethrim, did you really do what that felt like?'

'Give thanks for a set of above-spec circuit breakers and APUs when you say that, and yes,' The chief engineer admitted.

Lennart decided not to admit to being completely dumbfounded, and said, 'Both, as usual?' meaning to write him up for his usual combination of commendation for quick thinking and reprimand for eccentric thinking, which almost managed to make sense.

'You could have warned me,' the deputy chief engineer who had drawn the bridge-liaison straw this time complained.

'If he'd told anybody,' Lennart said to the liaison officer, 'I would have stopped him, because only a lunatic would do that. Right?' He added to Mirannon.

'Pretty much,' he admitted. 'We're actually lucky their second salvo managed to hit.'

'As lucky as we are,' Lennart asked rhetorically, 'that the third full salvo didn't?'

'Ah. QX, you have a point,' Mirannon admitted. What he had done was to take the main reactor out of circuit for two seconds, and use the main power grid to take up the energy from the bow shields and the volley deposited on them. Regenerating shields for a second and a half - and he had nearly torn the power grid in half and come close to blowing out most of the electronics to do so.

'That may have been a technical miracle, but I don't like being in a position where I have to depend on miracles - particularly not when they're sprung on me as a surprise,' Lennart said.

'Skipper, I am the resident miracle worker, and I have to say I don't particularly care for it myself - especially as I don't think I could do that again if I tried,' Mirannon admitted.

'At least warn me next time you intend to try,' Lennart said.

They had made a dent, at least, and avoided having to suffer the consequences of taking one in return. One more step- out of how many?

Over Ord Corban, things were getting interesting. Vehrec had sent the light clone wars fighters up as first shock group, scattering their light lasers across the rebel formation to break it up and kill off the slower and more fragile Z–95s, the Y-wings which were too slow to escape a concentration of fire - and also on warhead interception. The rebels had almost total warhead ascendancy in the opening phase because virtually every Imperial capable of it was carrying heavy antiship torpedoes, but that was the tradeoff the Imperials had chose to make, and didn't seem to be doing too badly out of it so far.

The planet could give the alliance fighters little jamming support, and too many of the Imperial craft were shuttles and transports with inherently superior electronics fits; no obscurement, and the rapid light lasers of the Nimbus and Aethersprite were perfect for the intercept job. Maybe not quite as useful as those freak Starwings he seemed to have inherited from Black Prince's fighter wing, which were having a field day picking off rebel fighters flying straight and level for launch.

The alliance fighters were, in any case, coming in dumb. Whoever was in charge, probably a flight controller based on Admonisher, simply wasn't thinking big enough and believed they could run a mass fighter battle as basically a small fighter battle, but much more of it. Fast and confused, speed and manoeuvre and winner take all - going all the way back to the deep past of the republic, before the clone wars.

Major fighter combat simply didn't work like that. The quantity produced a quality all its own, it was inherently more collective, and inherently more attritional.  
Try to bring everyone back, and the chances were that a group commander would lose far more of his people than if they just accepted some of them were going to die and planned accordingly.

The rebel controller fell straight into that trap, and tried to do a grand scale version of a straightforward slash, and set his force's pacing, spacing and timing to match. He failed to keep close control, failed to push the leading edge of the Alliance formation in to their deaths, and got them killed anyway when the solid, integrated wall of shot the Imperial formation spat out carved the leading rebel elements apart.  
What was left of the A's and X's scattered under the weight of fire and tried to break past the Imperial formation, but the trailing elements of division three and the turrets of the transports were there waiting for them.

That included Vehrec's Avengers; as the scattered cloud of Alliance fighters zig-zagged towards a dragon's mouth of Imperial fire, he itched to call 'Break and Attack', but that would give an opportunity back to the rebels that they didn't deserve. A solid gun formation was still the best move - although one of the Y-wing squadron commanders was relatively smart, taking two other squadrons with him and moving out wide on the flank to get crossfire and maybe break up the Imperial formation. Better deal with that; Vehrec detached three squadrons of division three to intercept- including those gunship Starwings, it would be interesting to watch them in isolation.

The main event, though, the rebels were still being stupid. Rather than expose themselves to formal, organised fire, the lead elements had counterthrusted and picked a furball with division one. The clone war types were fragile but unbelievably dextrous - and from the counterforce point of view, hardly worth the trouble it took to put them down. Only the Actis had firepower remotely close to the current generation of craft. Actually, if the rebels had held to their original plan of cutting through and engaging the Imperial rear echelon, they would have been better off.

Most of their losses had actually been down to the heavy-gunned division three firing past the light fighters any way. And in some unfortunate cases, into. There had been friendly fire losses - but there had been far more enemy losses, which made the price acceptable.

The Alliance mocked the Empire for being so casual with each other's lives, but there were maybe a hundred exploded Alliance fighters to argue to the contrary. Small scale, flight, squadron, maybe even wing, he would concede the Alliance had a tactical edge, but it was precisely that efficiency in small things that led them into error when they started counting in hundreds.

His second personal kill was an A-wing trying to bolt past and join the planetary group; he lined up on the leader of a pair, tracked it, made sure it knew it was being targeted - then twitched right and snapshot into the wingman who had been trying to protect his leader, and who had made an easy target of himself trying to line up on the Avenger.

Some of the A-wings were trying to use their pivot guns to strafe past the Imperials as they broke outside; if they were just strafing they were safely ignorable - never hit anything like that - if they were flying with their concentration on the guns, they were easy targets - one of them was his third kill.

One man turret or pivot fighters never worked, not with a human pilot anyway. Too much to do. There was a fireball on the right where one strafing A-wing ploughed head-on into an old bomber-winged protoAvenger; deliberate probably, but could have been accidental, there was definitely something wrong with those things' avionics, as often as they managed to ram things their collision detection must be nonexistent.  
Not that it mattered at the moment; the opportunity for a mass area shoot, formation on formation, had dwindled to nearly nothing, so he gave the order; 'Division three, break and attack.'

That committed everything to one fight or another, this was the time of attrition, when he would see if the superior Imperial plan for large scale action had tipped the odds in the rolling fight that was now breaking out.

Probably, he thought, probably; the numbers were trending that way, so many of their best icebreakers, the A–wings, were gone, and only in the O-club bar afterwards were X-wings capable of taking on odds of five to one. They were good, but they weren't that good. With that order it had turned into a tiderace of a battle, waves of fighters crashing against each other, and Vehrec and his bodyguard found themselves zig-zagging out of the fight, looking to find a vantage point from which he could actually make a difference as a group commander.

Where were the rebels strongest, and who were they threatening? Where were there Imperials without much heat on, that he could point at a better target?

Avengers were not designed for AWACS work, that was the root of it - although, was any fighter? All of his thoughts about large scale action and grand tactics, and this was starting to look like a pretty elementary problem.

Who else was with the Force? Black Prince's multirole wing commander, riding one of the ATRs. Perfect. They could do the sensor sweeps and filtering, identify situations that he could he could then focus on - basically, staff work.

The flank guard group had run out of targets close to; he sent the mixed group of Starwings, Hunters and Avengers down to reinforce division two blockading the planet - there were dogfights in low orbit now; some of the rebels had made it that far.

Subformations of division three, pursuing threats identified by active sensor - he made more use of his scanner than he did his guns, using it like a spotlight, picking up on concentrations of rebel fighters. As the battle grew thinner and more spread out, he was able to withdraw squadrons from the furball and use them for long range massed fire again.

There was one critical point, when the half-strength remains of three X- and A-wing squadrons tried to hunt him down in person; oh, good, part of him thought - the squadron had lost one, but eleven Avengers, good odds, bring it on.

That part of him was disappointed in himself when he vectored in two squadrons of Actis to shred them before they got that far, and the rebels broke and ran before any of the Avengers could get a clear shot. Just as relieved, though, not to have to bother with that now when there was a battle to fight.

Move and countermove, the rebels picking up some victories but not many - halfway through the texture of the fight changed, and Vehrec guessed the controllers on Admonisher had too much to do, trying to steer the other half of their fighter complement past Black Prince's point defence envelope, and had handed over control to the planet.

That made things slightly harder - they could coordinate their efforts with what was left of planetary point defence - but only slightly, as they came from the same mould, prone to make the same mistakes, and had been pounded pretty badly already.  
Thrust and counterthrust, volley, evade and reform, things were tipping the Empire's way - then, a pause, nothing much happening - as it stretched out, no urgent com traffic, no crossing flashes of laserfire, he realised most of the rebel fighters had turned to flee. There were maybe seven or eight squadrons left - about what he had lost, actually - bolting for hyperspace, and a handful of runs out from the edge of the atmosphere, although not many.

Hmm. Ninety to a hundred Imperial fighters destroyed and ten shuttles and transports, for the cost of some three hundred rebel. That could, he thought, have been so much worse.

'Vehrec? Lennart,' Voice over the com unit again. 'Leave your division one and the stormtrooper transports to blockade the planet, take the rest to coordinate with Fist for torpedo strikes on Reiver.'

They were tired; not every day they had to fight a battle like that. Physically and emotionally tired, and in some cases low on fuel. Still, if there was more to do, who could say stop, enough? Although -

'Captain Lennart, you have the other half of Admonisher's fighter complement on attack approaches. No support?'

'Not necessary,' Lennart replied.

Operationally, there was half a solution: the hyperdrive fighters as a manoeuvre element. Detached Forces Wave One ought to be arriving there soon, as well.  
As far as the fighter situation went, it was half true; evading as Black Prince was, not all of Admonisher's fighters had the thrust to catch her, and those that did were scattered everywhere by the Imperial destroyer's erratic course track - not exactly welcome, but feasibly within the limits of point defence to eliminate in detail.

Same reason why he didn't want a heavy rocket strike on Admonisher, however welcome it might be; if that ship's point defence was up to the same standard as her main guns, then it would cost too many Imperial fighters.

In fact, the poor performance of her fighter wing had been a pleasant surprise. Unexpected, definitely welcome - and slightly puzzling.

Both ships were, broadly speaking, closing on each other; another factor in Black Prince's favour - she was the further out, and by using full power in evasion, that drove her closer in to the main four-ship destroyer action; Admonisher's doing the same would push her outwards and away. Both thought it preferable to lose distance than take hits.

Why not accept help, surround Admonisher and pound her with everything the squadron could throw?

Because they couldn't do the footwork, was the short version. Better she waste her fire trying and failing - most of the time - to hit Black Prince than she be given a shoal of new targets that she would be able to inflict real damage on.

Although…Lennart called up an internal systems monitoring status tracker; yes, there it was. He walked over to one of the sensor-signal interpretation consoles, knocked on it. 'Doctor Nygma, are you in there?'

'How did you figure it out?' the mad doctor's voice came back.

'Same logic you used to figure out there was no point keeping quiet,' Lennart said, keeping an eye on the main tactical board - nothing desperately urgent, just a stream of eight hundred teraton salvos incoming.

'Oh, well, I wouldn't say that, well actually I probably would, but the thing of the think is that I have very iodosyncratic logic processes.'

Lennart couldn't spare the brain space to remember what the prefix 'Iodo-' meant but he did say, 'Because you're trying to make sense of the actions and decisions of people too frightened and confused to think logically?'

'Krutz. I was hoping that the only use for crazy-bad logic was the fun of it, that there actually wasn't a reason,' Nygma said.

'You think you've got problems? I need your support with that rebel cruiser; I need you to board it and cause chaos.'

'Chaos is good messy fun,' Nygma said, 'especially in the mathematical sense - but isn't that being rather badly shot at?' Nygma quibbled.

'No, Voracious and Hialaya Karu are doing rather well,' Lennart deadpanned, and went on, 'Did you make identical identities, or did you produce a spectrum of enhanced and altered character traits as an exercise in the mathematics of survival?'

'Maybe I did, and maybe I didn't, what's it to you?' Nygma said, truculently, then 'See? That was a version exhibiting mild paranoia. Although I used to do that when there was just a fleshy one or two of me too.'

'And facing down a heavy destroyer, I have time for this?' Lennart wondered.

Admonisher briefly sideslipped towards the main action, rolled to present her batteries to Fist - Lennart ordered a concentration on her stern over the engines. Admonisher snapshot with what was ready and turned back to face them.

'Summon up all your inner misery and gloom,' Lennart continued, 'transfer to our holocom unit - not in that order - and go and enter into a suicide pact with One and Indivisible's computers. Change the life system to fluorine settings, redefine the meaning of 'up', hypnotise them with light fixtures, go wild. Oh, and ransack them for anything and everything of intelligence use.'

'Is there a less traumatic alternative?' Nygma asked.

'Well, if you think being threatened would improve your performance, I can charge you with interfering with the operations of the Imperial armed forces, and have you downloaded to a digital watch to await trial,' Lennart said, looking away to the tactical map, watching the emergence, dispersal to attack formation, and first shots fired from detached forces wave one.

'You know, this is getting perilously close to treading on the toes of a cultural icon. I seem to remember a paranoid android-'

'Is that from the same story that involved the use of an axe as a reprogramming tool?' Lennart asked, rhetorically. 'Com-Scan, internal network rolling purge-'

'All right, all right,' Dr Nygma agreed to go. 'Just don't call me Eddie.'

'You know,' Lennart added conversationally to Brenn, 'Occasionally I wonder if we blow our own trumpet too much, if we really are special or if there aren't thousands of Imperial ships who would have been able to do the same, if they had the chance. Then I realise I only think that way because I'm forgetting moments like this.'

'Hot work, isn't it?' Brenn agreed. 'I wonder who's in charge over there. They are fairly good.'

'Mon Evarra's behaving like a private ship,' Lennart said. 'That could be it. They always were bold, especially for Mon Cal.'

'Guns, Helm, I want this-' sketched the move, a slow roll towards One and Indivisible, long range time on target salvo, 'as an opening, third order him.'

'We should, so we shouldn't, so we will, so we can't?' Rythanor wondered, not quite getting it. 'Something inbound - very large, hard driven civilian, five light years and seventy seconds out; I'd positively identify an FSCV if I could think of any remotely intelligent reason for one being there.'

'Get the drop point and keep watch on it. Anyway, from there, immediate turn away, roll back to bear and second volley, yaw left and volley on Admonisher, thrust, nose-down three step zigzag, corkscrew right and up from there.' A complicated sequence, but it had the effect he was after.

One and Indivisible was suffering, electronically - some very strange emissions coming out of her main com antenna, most of the guns in local control, engines firing and counterfiring; no fit state to resist fire.

The two full volleys Black Prince sent into One and Indivisible burnt shielding away, but it was the reaction from Admonisher that was important, rolling to bear and spitting out one full volley that the turnaway sidestepped, then breaking off in turn when Black Prince turned back towards her unprotected bow.

The first converged sheaf missed, but gunnery had been expecting Admonisher to roll round to present her dorsal surface; a slight sideslip took the rebel out of some of the volley, but not all. Starboard bow, already running hot.

There was a blue-violet flare of a shield bubble blowing out - local overload - followed by an orange-red billow of vapourised durasteel and payload. What did a Shockwave carry up there in the bow? Forward repulsor, tractor beam cluster, life support stores. Nothing vital.

The return shot was a set of single battery volleys, three hit Black Prince, one over the superstructure, one forward, one aft and port. Energy, no burnthroughs, not yet. By the breadth of a highly unauthorised miracle. The Shockwave class's shielding was, for their size, average; capable of withstanding an instantaneous surge of two point five petatons, total load to failure six hundred petatons.

The Imperial destroyer couldn't match those numbers, and didn't intend to - as long as she could keep hitting often enough to burn through that shielding, and keep moving enough that her own thinner shields could take what of Admonisher's fire actually caught up with her.

So far, Lennart was winning, but by less than the margin of error.

One and Indivisible was, by this stage, much less well off. The volleys burnt through one shield- outer edge of the starboard half of the ring. There were more threat angles than the mangled ship had shields left to cover.

Her guns turned towards Black Prince - a spectacularly silly move, as with the distance and the fire control problems, the hit probabilities were low - and she desperately needed her guns as the chief defence against the Imperial ships close to. Voracious was close, and still trying to fend off the fighters, but Hialaya Karu had clear space around her and used it to stabilise out and fire a sequence of full time-on-target volleys into the cruiser.

One caught the outer starboard limb and exploded it; Hialaya Karu started to work inwards from there. That and the cruiser had never even begun to react effectively to the frigates and corvettes moving to englobe her.

Comarre Meridian was exchanging fire with the core globe - had taken an unlucky hit, and the concrete bow cap starting to burn made an interesting sight - but Obdurate had moved out at a wider tangent, and was attacking the armature that held the connected the core ship to the doughnut.

There was a fireball, strangely channelled by the globe and the ring, and the globe was briefly visible on sensor images as floating free, blasted loose or cut loose it was hard to say, because there was an emergence flare from hyperspace, and the FSCV emerged, very close to and on collision track with One and Indivisible.

Light forces wave two knew what was going to happen; they ceased fire and scattered. Escape pods and shuttles from the container transport followed them at maximum thrust; Commander Carcovaan had found a way to prevent his chance slipping by him after all.

There was very little a ship as badly battered as One and Indivisible could do; that little was done, laserfire reaching out to and tearing the travelhead of the forcefield ship apart, but there was too much mass, too much momentum, and most of it was containers of hypermatter fuel and billets of durasteel. Carcovaan had commandeered the base replenishment transport.

The containers behaved like a shotgun blast, catching the core ship - already raked by fire from Voracious and Hialaya Karu - and now flare after flare of metal heated to vapourisation by the impact as the stern travelhead continued to drive the stack forward.  
The stack broke down after the first few, the last half-dozen bubbled and the aft main motors going wild, but it had done its work, and there were a few shredded fragments of rebel cruiser left.

'See?' Caliphant said to Voracious' bridge team. 'The rebels can't possibly hope to win against Imperial resources. Even our kamikazes come in extra large.'

Lennart's response was slightly more considered. 'That really wasn't necessary, this late in the action and coming apart as it was, and that was a perfectly good transport. I've half a mind to dock the cost out of Carcovaan's pay.'

'Don't look at me; my head's hurting trying to work out how to split up the kill credit,' Brenn replied.

'At least we have a final total of how much there is to be had. Com-scan, send Hialaya Karu to join Fist, and signal Voracious and the rest of light forces wave two to join us. We still have Admonisher to put down.'


	40. Chapter 40

'So far, so good, but I don't see how much longer the Rebels can keep playing a losing game,' Lennart said.

'The results may be in our favour, but the odds aren't, and if they keep ruthlessly playing the odds - no, they're not stupid enough to stick to numbers that are wrong. Are we about to play musical jump points?' Brenn suggested.

'More like hyperspace roulette,' Lennart said. 'The Alliance tried to break the planetary blockade too soon, before it was fully established in fact, we don't know what else is still down there. Reiver can't last much longer, but Mon Evarra's going to be difficult to put down.'

'At four to one? She's good, but-' Brenn said.

'Good enough to last long enough to take the odds down to three to one. They'll have to, though. Mon Evarra may be a crack ship, not the sort I would want to send anybody but us against, but still less do I want to have to send them up against that.'

He meant Admonisher, dancing though Black Prince's fire and landing hits of her own in return. The Imperial ship was hitting the rebel about twice as often as she was being hit in return, which would have been excellent if they weren't up against a ship with twice the firepower and shielding.

Not that the situation wasn't likely to change.

'As we close,' Lennart assessed, 'the conventional odds of hitting go up - which would in theory be disadvantageous for us, but both of us will switch to full converged sheaf, time on target salvos - we're as likely to burn through as they are and we will hit more often. Very close action favours us, and I expect they've looked deeply enough at the numbers to work that out.'

'They'll stay in place long enough to let their bombers get to us, and then manoeuvre clear for another pass?' Brenn theorised.

'That implies a faith in their small craft that I don't see being justified. Let's hope so, but I doubt it.'

Up above in the Imperial suite, Adannan was watching the battle, without a great deal of comprehension. His goons were clustered around him - and that was all they really were, he admitted to himself.  
I have surrounded myself with inferiors, he thought. Then again, is it actually possible for a dark adept not to do so?

The flares and flashes out there were irrelevant to the larger plan. Simply a backdrop. Lennart wouldn't have gone and picked a fight he didn't expect to win. Just because he didn't think it was going to be easy was no reason to doubt that.

Casualties, too - lesser beings, what did they matter? Nothing. Upon Imperial victory - then what?  
There would still be rebel elements alive on the planet; they would have to be dug out - and he had the authority, first to order what was left of that planet's fortifications preserved, second to take charge of the ground operation personally.  
It would be entertaining, but there were too many variables, too many people on both sides who had an interest in his non- survival.

What was Lennart's plan? Carefully, he tried eavesdropping on the Captain's thoughts - they were utterly taken up with the moment. Lennart's mind was a blizzard of potential futures considered, as unlike meditation as it was possible to be - active searching, grabbing at the might. Adannan could barely follow it at all, but he prodded gently - introduced a tendril of himself, his scent as it were, to see what would happen and what Lennart thought he needed to do.  
Half a dozen plans, almost all of them involving violence, mostly ridiculous degrees of overkill. Interestingly, the mental model Lennart seemed to be using to plot his demise was the Jedi he had worked with during the Clone Wars, adjusted slightly for circumstance.

The thought of obedience was not in him, and his political thought revolved around how to get away with killing the dark Jedi, and…what?  
Evidence? How can he prove anything? Even if he heard every word - and he thinks he has, how? - I could have been lying. His word against mine…no, my word against the suspicions of whoever this mess ends up in the lap of. There are some remarkably suspicious people out there, I should know, I am one, and I would gleefully take any of my rivals' heads off on the strength of what he has against me, Adannan thought.

So - I threaten him with the power of the Sith, and he calls my bluff - the empire might gain him, but I get an Inquisitor's lightsabre to chew on. Not good.  
Bluff? Not likely, he knows the situation too well. Any hope of tripping him up with that, allowing his own information to lead him into error? I know the people and personalities better than he does…and most of them are opportunist sociopaths, savage to a fault. Not really.

Run through the potential sequence of events. I confront him and force him to bend the knee as my apprentice - or attempt to do so immediately after he has fought and defeated a superior enemy force, and is riding high in the respect and confidence of his crew. Worst possible time.

It'll have to be done, though. I am being appallingly weak over this. When would be the right moment - when he is at his lowest and most miserable? How to arrange that, have him sacked?

If I dismiss him from his post, that would work - in fact, it might be necessary. The chances are he would give me all the excuses I need then, and obviously it restricts his power to use his position against me.

Yes, that would be it; make sure his only path of service to the Empire is through the Force.

On Fist's improvised emergency bridge, Captain Tevar was retaining control of her temper with some difficulty. She wanted Reiver dead, destroyed, taken apart, chopped into little bits she could jump up and down on then have the bits disintegrated. In the unlikely event there were many of the original crew left on board, she wanted to do the same to them for turning their coats and letting her ship down.

Yelling at the image on the bridge viewscreens wasn't going to do it though, and the next obvious thing, screaming at her bridge crew, wasn't going to achieve anything either.

What she was trying to do was to keep her shields up mainly against Mon Evarra, manoeuvre primarily with respect to the much smarter, much more elusive Mon Cal ship, and keep her guns focused on Reiver.

The rest of the force - Dynamic was already here supporting her, and it occurred to Tevar that she hadn't had to pass a single order to the lighter destroyer; he had simply slotted himself into her plans. Well, the lines of authority were hardly as clear as they could have been, the formal structure Lennart had intended to operate under largely having dissolved on her arrival.

Which was fine, as long as the force itself didn't dissolve. Which could still happen. Admonisher was landing hits at a rate of ten to fifteen percent on a ship that was behaving like a cross between a ghost and a swarm of locusts; turned against her ship, she wouldn't expect to survive longer than thirty seconds against that gunnery.

They had to finish here, had to grind Reiver down and move to englobe and burn down the rebel heavy - but first Reiver, for the sake of the name and the honour of the sector group.

Strategically, the Alliance had made a mistake with her; they should have withdrawn Reiver for refit elsewhere, where they could dismember her computer systems for intelligence purposes in peace and then reconstruct her for deception and false flag operations far away from here. Hazarding her at all was an error. Of course, that they had to was down to the fact that Lennart had lunged for them too quickly, helped by a little deception and a lot of cut corners. They hadn't had time to get the ship clear.

Tactically speaking, Reiver simply wasn't ready. Everything suggested she was on a skeleton crew of Imperial defectors and rebel volunteers, her fire was enthusiastic but ragged, her reactor wasn't even developing full power, and her evasion was from another age - slow, hesitant, gentle turns seconds apart.

In a way, Tevar wished it would put up more of a fight, but then, Mon Evarra was more than making up for it.

The elimination of the rebel cruiser left two Imperial destroyers and numerous frigates free to seek other targets; where were they - ah. Too close a distance to microjump in both cases, but Voracious was accelerating in a tangent to swing round Admonisher and join Black Prince, and Hialaya Karu was accelerating to take a position off Fist's starboard beam.

For a crew in an unfamiliar ship and burdened by many fools, Karu was shooting well. Too well, in fact - against Mon Evarra, any help was welcome, but as against Reiver, Captain Tevar wanted to order her - keep off, he's mine.

Apparently, the Rebel ship felt the same way. There was an electrogravitic surge and a spray of stray tachyons - hyperdrive being brought online.

'Guns-' Tevar began a preparative order.

'Her shields are still up, a component shot-'

Hialaya Karu's fire was arcing in now, fairly accurate, not that that gave Tevar much encouragement.

'Group together, bridge aimpoint, time on target-' Tevar gave the order, the guns waited until they were all charged together.

Tevar had to reach down into the fire control section of the pit and point it out on screen, would have had to do so even with proper facilities. Fist's bridge hadn't been customised with the same information handling devices as Black Prince- but soon would be, Tevar thought; this is damned undignified.

The rounds crashed out - and the ship kicked from Mon Evarra's taking the opportunity to put her shots in - as Reiver turned and accelerated to hyperspace. They caught the renegade destroyer over the port flank aft - one main repulsor emitter, a secondary reactor, life support aeroponics, parts and spares. One of the hyperdrive cores, but Reiver had the same multiple redundancy as all the class.

She managed to make the jump. Tevar opened her mouth to scream in frustrated rage, decided that would not be consistent with her status as the captain of an Imperial warship, turned to her chief navigation officer and said, in a sweetly reasonable voice that her crew knew was the prelude to her tearing somebody's head off, 'If you would care to plot that and chart a pursuit course, I would be obliged.'

There was only one safe response. 'Aye aye, Captain.'

Mon Evarra was behaving like a wolfhound let loose. Without the lead ship to conform to, she accelerated away, vectored laterally - sideways in plain English - moving away from Fist and curving round, strafing Dynamic. Which made the fundamental mistake, helmsman reacting automatically as per doctrine before Dordd could countermand him, of turning her belly. The most heavily armoured and most structurally sound surface the ship had, and one whose shielding could take a bit more abuse than it had so far.

It was a standard posture for bayless, all-gun ships; under the circumstances it was worse than useless.

Aldrem grabbed the edges of his console and tried hard not to step beyond his established station by yelling at the helm control team; that was Dordd's job.

Useless to try and ride the attack out, their only effective defence was their firepower, and there was no reason at all for the rebels to stop shooting at them.

Hialaya Karu was sending out a long string of yellowish-green bolts, a rippling fire tracking across the darting, hummingbird Mon Cal ship, some hitting her - but not enough to divert her from the much closer, much more tempting target.

Dordd shouted at his helm control team, and the destroyer's bow began to dip - too slowly, and yawing out of line - good but unintentional, and the result of nerves. For a moment, he believed in cloning, considering how many places he wanted to be in at once.  
Mon Evarra mistimed it slightly - couldn't quite believe that Dynamic was moving so slowly.

There was a temporary pause, maybe half a second, and the bridge crew looked at Dordd, hopefully; maybe the reb had decided to stop shooting at them? He started to issue the order 'Brace for impact-' realised it would be pointless, take far too long to react to for any good to be done.

Started to say 'Roll 120 starboard-' then the time on target hit.

The converged sheaf the rebel ship fired was aimed for the turret complex. The speed of Dynamic's turn meant it hit too soon, just under the bow.

Fortunately, what was up there wasn't all that vital - the chemical flare of armour boiling off, navigation shield generators, repulsor, manoeuvre jets - not as if they were using them anyway.

Crap, Aldrem thought. Damn decentralised Mon Cal, there's no critical aim point, except try to chew through the entire length of the ship to get at the reactor and engines. No obvious bridge module, not even a single weapon complex, with triple turrets I can't viably take fire window shots to knock their turrets out.

On this ship, I feel as if I'm fighting with my feet nailed to the ground. No alternatives, are there? They'll probably get me before I manage to get them. Damn probability. 'On the bow, on my mark, converged sheaf, fire.'

Mon Evarra's second salvo hit about ten milliseconds after Dynamic's first. From the rebel ship, there was a flare of light, a blue-violet planar explosion as the bow shield overloaded and blew out, but only two relatively small green fireballs as shot hit the physical hull - one followed by a secondary cluster of blasts as antifighter missiles in a point defence cluster near the hit detonated, but not much against a ship that size.

On the Imperial ship, the shields served to glance some of the incoming energy - but not enough. The splashes of rebel fire over the long, thin ship appeared as if it was being grasped and squeezed in an indigo fist; felt more or less like that, too.

Mon Evarra was faster to manoeuvre, and knew it; climbed and rolled - Aldrem tried to get A turret to put a shot into the rebel's less focused flank shields, but they shifted energy too fast, there was no blind spot.

The order that would decentralise their fire and give them a chance to outreact the rebels was 'Independent Fire-' Even handing over power and trust to men he had known for years was difficult. He wanted to be the master of his own fate, and that of any poor bastard unlucky enough to be on the receiving end. That was human, faith in himself and his own talent; it was not, he forced himself to accept, professional. What they had to do was whatever worked.

'Local control, fire at will. Vary aimpoints, make them dance.' The three turrets had aimed apart and started spitting fire at the rebel before he had got as far as the 't' in 'control'.

'Right, you son of a sea snake,' he muttered looking at the image of the Mon Cal cruiser, 'where is your soft spot…'

Her game plan now, Aldrem thought, Reiver barely made it out alive, and Fist is moving to pursue - hyperdrive activating now. Captain Tevar's locked on to that ship, in the worst possible sense of the term.

Reiver lost shield capacity and took damage, hasn't left the system, is close around Corban-III-e, the last remaining credibly defended outworld - although not heavily enough defended to keep Fist away. Hoping to cool off enough to re-enter the fight. Not likely to get the chance, but while Fist is taking Reiver apart, Mon Evarra has a chance to do the same to us, then pursue.

Damn them and their deceptive, shifting ship designs; it's like trying to pick out an individual wrinkle on my great-granny's face. And she had the looks of a small moon. We have identified most of the actual weapon blisters, Aldrem thought, but that's little help.

Taking out one gun at a time is going to be pathetically slow. We may do more by overpenetration - if there was such a thing as doing too much damage - but they were almost as well armoured internally as they were externally, their shock resistance and damage limitation measures were excellent. She would have to be pounded to death.

Did they have a big enough stick? Nine guns looked very well on paper, fifteen hundred and forty-eight teratons a salvo, but Dynamic's powerplant could only give them a thousand and eighteen. Not enough, not enough at all - and they had already burnt off most of their capacitor load.

Was there a panacea target? Bridge - no, not obvious enough where it was. It would matter if it could be hit, but it couldn't except by dumb luck, so - the heatsinks.

Well, thank you very kriffing much, Dordd thought looking at the retreating flare of Fist's engine vents as the larger ship accelerated to lightspeed. Leaving me to deal with this thing.

The numbers didn't work; despite everything the rebels could do in evasion and jamming, Aldrem and his turret team were getting a hit rate of eighty-five percent or better, extraordinary. The alliance gun crews were very good, not in Pel Aldrem's class but then considering the target they didn't need to be. At these rates, neither craft had more than two minutes to live - but Dynamic would run out of time before Mon Evarra.

Dordd had tried to get torpedoes off, they were a great equaliser in theory, but the rebel's point defence was too good, splashing them apart almost as soon as they were out of the tubes. At least the safety interlocks worked.

'I intend to spin the ship to mask the torpedo tubes - stand by.'

The alliance ship would keep firing - could the shield control crew keep focus oriented on the rebel, avoid showing thin, vulnerable spots? Could the torpedo team get their shots off safely from a rapidly spinning ship? Absurd to have to ask, under normal circumstances.

Turning away would mask the guns; Aldrem would probably scream at him - admittedly with good cause - but he had to do something different, playing it straight would lead to defeat.

Main battery control was calling, anyway. 'What is it, Lieutenant?'

'The rebels are lining up for another time on target on the turret line,' Aldrem said. His tone - contained frustration and rage - added, in effect, so kriffing well manoeuvre. To the turrets he said, 'This is central, we're going to be manoeuvring fairly wildly,' I hope, he didn't say, 'I'll take the shot.'

Dynamic's helm control was having a miserable time of it; they could keep the ship alive by dong solely that, but they couldn't really fight the ship, and although the Captain was trying not to make it worse by shouting at them, spooking them into being even less effective, there were moments when he simply couldn't help it. Threaten them with disrating? No, too little, Dordd thought. Execution? Too much chance of having to follow through on that threat too soon, and is there anyone who would actually be better? Probably not.

They were still poor, and Dordd realised that he had never cancelled the preparative for the torpedo turn to bear. Dynamic pitched down again, and some of the rebel gunners tracked the manoeuvre, others not; there was a figure eight shaped splash of violet impacts, over the forward superstructure and the turret line.

The simultaneous crash was more than the shields could take, three bolts leaked through - two into the forward edge of the superstructure. Crew quarters, damage control bunker, and the ship's main offices - no effect on the immediate fighting ability of the ship, and possibly rather good in the long term.

The third hit burned through the armour beside C turret. Most of the vapourised metal blew outwards, baffles and tensors doing what they could, but the shock damage - Fendon lunged for that panel, almost snapped the switches off cutting power to C and draining the capacitor bank back into A and B. It took half a second for the containment shield around the energy cells to heat to the point of uselessness; an eternity, and just long enough.

Instead of a multi-petaton eruption that would have broken the ship's back and laid her armoured skin wide open, they got a relative fizzle; a low yield detonation that mostly vented out through the hole the shot had carved in the ship's hull. Mostly.

When the flare had cleared, C turret - closest to main battery command - was lying askew, mounting twisted out of shape, and blackened - obviously inoperable, and most of the indicators on the status board were red. Or black. Suluur was staring at the board in undisguised horror; of course, Ahdria - but the rest of them wanted to stay alive still. Aldrem was about to shout at him when he visibly brought himself back under control.

Dynamic had put her nose down, been hit hard, and was now pitching back up; six guns charged and operational - Aldrem steered both turrets onto line and squeezed the trigger as the sight came on. Exactly as he had intended - starboard side, over the highest point of neutrino flux, and so close together as to be almost a single impact - even Mon Cal shielding couldn't cope, flared brightly and faded; the armour of the rebel ship burst outwards in a cloud of superheated vapour, and there was a definite secondary explosion, as at least one set of coils overloaded and destroyed themselves.

Blow for blow, and neither side daft enough to think that was anything near an end of it. Dynamic was porpoising, her bow coming back up too fast for Aldrem to get a second shot off, and exposing the ship's belly again. Aldrem and Dordd both screamed at the helm team to roll to bring the guns to bear, but instead of pivoting on the main engines, which would have resulted in the ship's bow describing an arc, the confused, frightened helm crew made a manoeuvre thrusters roll, in place, on the long axis, and inherently slower considering the bow manoeuvre thrusters were gone.

Not all the rebel guns fired, the heatsink hit had done that much - and they had moved very fast to avoid overloading what was left of it. Enough to punch through traumatised, shock-damaged shields.

For a second, Dordd saw the bow of his ship outlined in creation-hot plasma.

Oh kriff the reactor's gone, he thought; no, can't have, if I'm still alive enough to think I'm dead, it must be the secondary. Time to leave. 'Helm, input navigation package E and execute.'

A preplanned escape jump to the outer system - Dordd hoped his ship was in sufficient shape to make it. And before they were hit again, he added to himself - underside and bow shields were almost completely gone, shield generators damaged, dorsal-mid weak.

This time, they got it right. A blizzard of blue-white replaced the violet flare he was expecting.

'Lads,' Aldrem announced, before deciding to say it formally, 'Main battery direction will remain closed up; turret crews A and B, assist damage control with turret C.' Best compromise available. He didn't want Suluur going down there and trying to pull incandescent durasteel beams off the mangled body of his girlfriend - or the thin red smear which was actually more likely. He did need to do something, and this was it.  
His old friend was a stoic, a fairly distant man most of the time. Aldrem didn't want to think about how he would react after finding, and losing, someone who had managed to get under his skin and made him show a more human side.

Stang, Aldrem thought, she's even getting to me, I'm more worried about that than I am about three guns out of action. Conventional wisdom said keep busy, find something to do to avoid having time to grieve.

'While we're waiting for them to catch us,' he said, blackly, 'I want a breakdown of Mon Evarra's shooting skills. Performance of individual weapon mounts, identify their battery groups, their reaction times to changing circumstances and changing plans. Our best direction to come at them from, and theirs to us. Bring the data up.'

On the bridge, Dordd was listening to the long, long list of damage reports come in, as they drifted in the outer fringes of the system. Wondering what they could be expected to achieve if - when - they had to go back into the fire.

There were things happening outsystem, too - a situation update from the flag on Jorvik; she and Allegiance-class Daring, Tector-class Peltast, Imperator-I Tigress, Imperial-II Speaker, Venator-class Varangian, were in theatre over Iushnevan, had ionised and were in the process of boarding the Moff's flagship; the sector group was offering only scattered and uncoordinated resistance.

Larger units of the regional support group were on their way; the warhogs were coming out to play. The capital ships, the battleships and battlecruisers of the regional support force, seldom found a chance to use their guns in anger.

Most rebel ships, the cost of the damage they could conceivably do was less than the fuel and wear cost of moving to intercept them.

This time, they had a genuine fight on their hands, at least four destroyer-class rebel ships and probably a multiplanetary siege campaign to conduct. They were not going to get left out.

Like most regional support groups, they had a single Heavy Battle Squadron, in this case three Mandator-class. As more Executors came off the slips, they would first be assigned one to a support group or task force as a fast striker and leadship, then additional heavy battle squadrons built around them.

They hadn't got theirs yet, Trucidatior was committed keeping an eye on a nationalised mining company which was showing signs of intending to revert to type, and evidently Stormbird had drawn the short straw and had to remain behind as reaction force in case of other trouble elsewhere.

The third unit of the Heavy Battle Squadron, the Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy, was due to arrive in sector in twenty minutes. Glorious. If the situation wasn't complicated and confusing enough, it would get that way soon. Tichy had a reputation for the obscure and convoluted, not surprising in a ship named for a man who may have been his own grandmother.

Apparently, Tichy was heading for the middle of nowhere; up to something, no doubt. A wavefront of cruisers and most of first battle squadron was heading for the rRasfenoni home planets; first battlecruiser squadron was moving towards the rimward end of the trade spur, blockade and interdict.

Anyone heading to help them, quickly enough to matter? Jorvik, maybe.

Fist did not want or need help, at this precise point in time; Black Prince had given her the precalculated drop point Lennart had been intending to use to assault Corban-III-e, and Tevar had chosen to go with that rather than wait long enough to calculate one.

It brought them out at relatively long gun range from the target, and too far for the planet's guns - they could reach, but at five light seconds out, the target area was so big barrage fire was all they could hope for.

Reiver started screaming for help, but there were no uncommitted rebels to help her - Karu was engaging Mon Evarra now, from medium range, and scoring hits.

Fist rolled to bear and opened fire. Imperial and Rebel manuals both recommended slow bombardment fire at this distance, form a stable platform; Reiver had learned better by now, began to evade - slow and meandering though, not full blooded dancing and darting - and Fist was on a closing vector.

Single shot, rippling fire at first - one main turbolaser firing every twelfth of a second, and the four heavy ion cannon together; it looked as if Fist was scribbling on Reiver, the long line of bolts tracking over her, wandering on and off target. Reiver was salvo-firing, all guns together, a terrific thump of recoil that did more for her evasion than any of the moves she actually intended, but that in itself guaranteed never hitting with more than one or two shot. Useful against a frigate, enough, given time, against a light destroyer, but useless against an equal. No real chance of a breach and no more heat than Fist could radiate away.

Reiver would be calculating another escape course - to deep space, to some hidden rebel base, to shelter under the fire-umbrella of Admonisher. Tevar intended to chase them to wherever she had to, out of the galaxy if need be - and just as she was promising herself to spend less time swearing revenge and more effort working on it, the fourth - last step in her plan came good.

That being, pound Reiver until she stopped being able to fight back. Three turbolaser bolts hit in mid-manoeuvre, as Reiver had no forward thrust on, and blasted away a panel of the shields - and the four ion bolts were lucky enough to hit in the same spot. Reiver's turret line spasmed, one gun spat out what looked like a flak bolt that burst five kilometres off, and one seemed to melt. Reiver started to roll to expose her other side, but it was slow, uncoordinated, barely under control.

'Ion cannon, maximum firepower,' she ordered; bolt-cluster after cluster splashed into the damaged destroyer scattering lightning over the hull. The lights went out, but there was still light - the turbolasers had not been ordered to cease, and they continued to drive their stream of shot into the unpowered hull. There were fires and molten metal glowing.

There was a scatter of escape pods, on independent isolated systems, or solid chemical boost. Fire on them - no. It would be an excess to start popping escape pods, particularly at this range, and especially as it would be more cruel to just leave them drifting there.

'Captain…' her exec suggested, 'it is possible that we could retake that ship.'

Tevar's tactical map was less complex than Lennart's but it still managed to show the essentials. Black Prince was fencing with Admonisher, if that was the right term for the hammerblows both ships were giving and taking.

Dynamic was - gone? No, far out in the cometary halo. Hialaya Karu engaging Mon Evarra, and capitalising on the damage Dynamic had done - the rebel ship did not look healthy now, but was still hitting back.

Voracious - trading fire with Admonisher, which kept turning to present her belly batteries to the light destroyer, both ships giving and taking hits.

Two wolfpacks of frigates and corvettes, the fast group chasing Admonisher and filling the space around her with fire, the shower of tracer looking a lot more impressive than the reality that they were mainly MTL.

The slow wolfpack was going for Mon Evarra, another blizzard of mainly mediums, and those few ships that did have heavy turbolasers starting to take return fire.

A boarding action would take minimum half an hour, with a complement of shuttles mostly busy elsewhere, could be two or three hours to flush the ship clean. Far too long.  
'Possible but not practical. Main guns, time on target, finish her.'

Reiver had nothing now, no defensive EW, no tensors - Fist fired three full time on target salvos. The first hit the superstructure, shattering it in a nova of molten metal; the second burnt into the ship's bow, blasting it open.

Third time was the charm. Reactor. It had cut out under the ion barrage, but was still very hot, and the structural centre of the ship, best placed to transmit the shock; Reiver burst apart, the green fireball then the spreading billow of yellow-orange-white.

Tevar chose not to resist the impulse this time, and let loose a howl of triumph. A kill, and an exceptionally large one. Mediocrely handled, but that was the point, wasn't it? To be better than they were, and win by that.

The bridge crew were equally excited; hardly the dignified resolution they tried to drum into them at the academy, but she could let them have their moment.


	41. Chapter 41

HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was a ship with a reputation, some parts of it good, most just passing strange. He had two mottoes, one official, one less so.  
The official version was "Navigare Necesse Est"- which was variously translated by the crew as 'Fly, Fly you fools', 'get me out of here', 'why me? Well, somebody has to do it', and 'I thought you knew how to steer this thing.' All of which the man himself would have recognised as bearing a certain validity.

The official unofficial motto was "More closed timelike curves than the Miss Gallifrey pageant."

And what a crew. Tichy had been an inadvertent xenologist, and probably the greatest amateur first contact man the galaxy had ever known; his life had been one long cascade of biological diversity, and the ship named for him had a high proportion of aliens among the crew even in these unenlightened days. Even numerous rated droids and mechanicals. The Cosmonaut had had an almost touching faith in the essential decency of computers - on record as saying "It's comforting, when you think about it, that only Man can be a bastard."

On current data he had been wrong, although it was possible he had had a better breed of computer to deal with, back in the dawn of the Republic.

The ship was idiosyncratic in several ways as well. The Mandator-I class was - had been - legally limited to short range hyperdrive only, for fear of what the largest and most heavily armed fleet in the galaxy might otherwise do.

There were two interesting technical issues, the first of them being, how do you build a limited range hyperdrive? In order to function at all, it has to be an extraordinarily capable and durable piece of kit. Shaving the margins to make it capable of only a thousand light years would leave it so close to overload and unable to withstand sudden loads in normal usage as to constitute a distinct hazard to the ship and the crew.

The other problem was a legal one. Who, if anybody, was going to insure compliance with this? Asking Kuat to do it themselves was obvious nonsense, and almost everyone else who was competent to do so was also in competition with KDY, a conflict of interest so obvious that even the Senate noticed.

In the end, the problem got palmed off on the Republic Judicial Corps, who used ships whose entire hyperdrive system was smaller than one of the circuit breakers in a Dreadnaught's engine room, and who would have found it as easy to put out a quasar by peeing on it as to bring down a renegade Mandator.

Kuat Drive Yards obeyed the law not out of respect for it, but out of consideration for their own reputation - and the balance of power that underlay the situation that made them their money. Many of their ships probably were in technical violation, as a matter of safety, but these were local modifications, and not part of any company wide effort - and nobody could prove otherwise, officially at least. It may even have been actually true.

One of the most interesting side effects was that a lot of research had been done on hyperdrive at the margins; failure conditions and possible retrievals, stability, miniaturisation - the clone war era fighters and their booster rings owed a lot to that.

Ijon Tichy was supposed to be a Mandator-I, but in practise was very much odder than that.

When it had become politically possible to uprate them, not only did he 'acquire' a full range, galactic-class hyperdrive, he had the cone and pole antennae of hyperdrive and associated field projectors - a towing rig. He could carry another craft of similar size and mass through hyperspace, retrieving a disabled sister ship or delivering a short-range version to a customer, or do stranger things- spaciobatics, they called it.

In this case, he was acting on information received - following a trail based on data from the capture of Oyadan that was leading them towards a point not quite in the middle of nowhere. Down, and off to the left a bit.

Mandators were older ships, but they had been kept up to date, and Tichy's descent sensors did register something there.

Emergence; and a light strike group, four Keldabe class destroyers, two old Recusant, and half a dozen frigates - a single wandering Imperator might be severely threatened, the group was a fair match for two, but for a full dreadnaught, it was playtime.

Tichy shrugged off the volley of fire they opened with, and reached out and grabbed the nearest Recusant with tractor/manipulator beams, sheared away the shielding with ion fire, and started prodding it. Pushing and pulling with tractor/pressors, twisting it, playing grab with the engine modules and pointing them in different directions, compressing and releasing the exoskeletal flaps.

By the time the destroyer completely lost the plot and attempted to turn on a collision course, Tichy's tractor operators had got to the stage of trying to play a tune on the exposed metal ribbing. An ion bolt below the bridge put paid to the ram.

The first of the Keldabes to engage got a rude shock when she tried to accelerate past the dreadnaught to the aft quarters and fire on the engine block.

Part of Tichy's towing gear was the projectors and uptakes necessary to extend some shield coverage over a ship being lifted. Not as good as the main hull's coverage, but good enough to form into a parabolic duct, and deflect the heavy bolts of the destroyer-monitor's main guns back at her.

The pi-th dan master of Furjoto the ship was named after would have approved of using the enemy's strength against them.

Keldabe-class destroyers boasted two very large and very peculiar guns of possible Confederate design, a hyperexcited blaster scaled up to the point where its ionic effects were significant; not quite as effective as an ion cannon the same size- but a lot more straightforward lethality. The Keldabes themselves - their front end was largely girderwork, squarer and heavier-looking than they really were; unfortunately, they didn't have the shielding or the mass to take a hit from their own main guns.

The second Recusant actually was ex-confederation, or at least the computer system was. How it had survived this long was anyone's guess, but Tichy did a truly cruel thing to it - expanded its consciousness. Included within its simple mental lexicon the concepts of obsolescence, cheapness, disposability. The droid ship was sub-sentient, operant modules for systems feeding into instinct and ego; Tichy dissolved that ego by showing it the evidence of how little its masters had really valued it, how it had been half way to the scrapheap from the moment of its creation. Rammed the evidence down its throat, actually. Then Tichy expanded on the other side of the equation, told it about the people it had destroyed, about the ambitions and the real potential it had squandered and the future it had helped to break.

Grief-stricken, the confederate destroyer and its droid working crew committed electronic suicide, leaving the flesh and blood pirates on board trapped in a slowly tumbling durasteel tomb without power or life support.

Even Tichy wasn't sure whether that actually constituted a virus or not.

The remaining three Keldabe destroyers were afraid to engage, first of all for the reason that absolutely anything might happen. Between the hundred-million ton xylophone and the electronic weeping and wailing from the second Recusant, there was no guarantee that their shot wouldn't, for instance, fly into a field of complexity, achieve sentience, turn into a flock of spacebats and fly away. Which was true enough, but then it occurred to them that they were facing a kriffing dreadnaught, and they had more than enough perfectly normal reasons to be afraid.

They had come to eliminate an errant Vigo-wannabe and conduct an assassination or five and a sector wide grand tour of bank raids, and this had not been in the job description.

They laid down a barrage - achieving nothing, swallowed up harmlessly by the huge ship's shielding, and turned away to escape to hyperspace.

Not fast enough. The seconds they took to turn was forever in computer time, and at least the Recusant had had something resembling electronic security - not enough to stave off the complexity of attack, but at least it had tried. By comparison, the Keldabes had nothing. It was a relatively simple matter to take control of the navigation data and amend it slightly.

Specifically, pick two ships, and give each destroyer the other's entry point, then sit back and laugh as the overgunned, relatively fragile ships sideswiped each other at hyperdrive-entry speeds.

Tichy could have brute-forced that, fine-focusing a grav projector at the entry points to create a steep enough pull to draw them into collision, or blinded them and pulled them off course with his EW fit and tractors, but this was more elegant.

Only poetic justice, and almost as odd as what happened to the last Keldabe; the one that had been left because Tichy's vector took him very close to the little ship, almost overrunning her. Which might have been more merciful than what actually happened, the best description of which was probably time bombing via the towing rig.

HIMS Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy was, after all, equipped to transport craft of his own size through hyperspace, and on something as small as a Keldabe he could take it along whether it wanted to go or not.

Reeled in by the tractors and whiplashed along into hyperspace, the little destroyer experienced first, the rest of the universe speed up around it, being able to do nothing, not fast enough to matter to the reality it was accelerating and dilating away from.

Then time came back to hammer the people on board with a vengeance as it was the universe that slowed down and they were dragged through spacetime unprotected, aging and withering as the cosmos stood still around them.

That had to be some kind of a record. Six light destroyer class craft destroyed or neutralised, without firing as much as a single turbolaser shot, and only one heavy ion cannon.

The Cosmonaut had been basically a peaceful man, but never shy about doing what had needed to be done. And there were other targets to sort out.

Ord Corban, and Voracious was wondering what she had got herself into. Admonisher was laying what fire could be spared from Black Prince on the light destroyer - and hitting, mostly.

Caliphant was getting hoarse from helm orders, and trying to keep his crew organised and cheerful and up to the mark. Time had got weird on him; seconds seeming like hours, hours seeming like minutes; this was the former. He was almost excruciatingly aware of what was happening, and starting to wonder, when does this end?

When you screw up badly enough to let them kill you, was the obvious answer. Or when they do.

Mon Evarra was firing by battery groups, slow and deliberate, timed against what of her heat dispersal remained intact; shaken, but still fighting effectively with what she had left.

About to get buried under a cloud of Imperial bombers looking for that breach in her shields, and already spitting point defence fire at them.

How likely were the rebels to remain in theatre - or at least how likely was Admonisher, if she lost the last of her squadron? As long as there was a chance to break the blockade and get anything out, they had an interest in staying.

Actually, in Admonisher's position, Lennart would have jumped out now, waited until the Empire sent in troops to reclaim and engineering assets to rebuild, and re-entered the fight then - reaping, potentially, a handsome bonus in lives taken and assets destroyed as well as doing more to break his own people out. He just hoped Admonisher's captain was too target fixated to think of it.

Dynamic was more or less out of it - could still give but was in no shape to take punishment, could only safely be brought into the end game. Fist had lost most of her shielding, mostly due to Mon Evarra, but was still intact, or at least had lost nothing further in this phase of the fight.

Voracious was moving and firing very well for a scratch crew, the incidents they had seen in the run-up to this had done them a lot for good, but the numbers weren't working for them. She simply wasn't doing as much good against the massive Shockwave as she would against a smaller target.

Detach her to reinforce the planetary blockade, allow the fighters and small craft holding there to use her as a base station, rest and replenish ordnance? Not yet - one side of the planet still had too many big guns for comfort, and it would also mean taking too much firepower out of the Imperial line. Well, melee.

'Voracious, this is Black Prince Actual. Go and pick on somebody your own size - manoeuvre clear of Admonisher, engage Mon Evarra,' Lennart ordered.

There wasn't really any more they could do than they were already to keep Admonisher off Voracious' back. The frigates and corvettes of detached forces wave one were squalling at her, thunderstorms' worth of green tracer, and doing well - well enough to draw counterfire. Secondary medium and light turbolasers from Admonisher reached out across the formation, seeing who was stolid enough not to flinch and who was jittery enough to run too far, too fast.

There was a clear contender for idiot of the moment; Yeklendim in their capture, Grey Princess. He evaded too radically, and then settled back down to steady weave too soon.

'Yeklendim,' Lennart commed him, 'jump out now. You're about to become a target.'

Yeklendim had the sense, for the first time in his career, to obey as he was officially supposed to instantly and without question.

Sarlatt on the sister ship Provornyy managed to do a little better than that, by accelerating towards Grey Princess and forcing her to turn away or be sideswiped - and avoid the salvo of MTL fire Admonisher had dropped ahead of Grey Princess in anticipation.

Grey Princess made it to lightspeed, she would move clear, then plot a return course immediately. In theory. The light gun fire washed over the rest of the group, mostly resistible - the Carracks could take it, and most of the force was operating on their captains' own judgement anyway.

Lennart did order the Marauders and Customs Corvettes to break out of the pack and draw a tangent across the rebel fighter group's line of attack.

Admonisher had no such support against Imperial fighters, but she did have a much thicker point defence fit. Vehrec was arguing with himself what to do - duty said go in close and strafe, common sense said long range warhead fire. Pilot ego said charge, good judgement said wait for Black Prince's fire to make an opening then move to exploit it.

Any compromise was likely to be worse than either option pursued decisively, he thought until he realised that the 'charge' plan would involve taking large, slow-manoeuvring shuttles into point blank range of a ship with an extensive point defence grid.

Maybe the compromise made sense, just this once.

'Division Two, aim for Admonisher's engines, all remaining warhead load. Division three, with me, we'll follow the warheads in and engage from close range.'

Olleyri on Black Prince was thinking, tennis. Royal tennis, old school, flat court, one 'g'; or splat. Or was it actually called squash? Whatever, it was useful training for this. Fast-moving hard things ricocheting everywhere, and trying to chase the angles and cover the positions, guide the fighters into a position they might be able to survive making a strike from.

The division of sublight fighters that had been released by Wave Two of the warships had had their first target snatched out from under them when One and Indivisible died; most of them had steered for Mon Evarra, and were about to launch on the wounded Mon Cal ship. Too many?

Olleyri identified about half of the fighters and bombers; ordered "Task Force Five, change of target: Admonisher. Accelerate in, ripple fire rockets from a hundred thousand kilometres out, proceed in to strafe. This is the main strike mission, run down your fuel reserves. Good luck and good hunting."'  
And stay still for all this to happen to you, you bastard, he thought at Admonisher, and hoped it wasn't listening.

Lennart wasn't so optimistic, and had good reason to be so. 'We're approaching the mathematical threshold, guns group up, tensors and compensators brace for recoil from sustained time on target volleys. Her hyperdrive's up.'

True; the target board was showing bent space and stray tachyons from Admonisher.

'I think it's valid.' Brenn said. 'Our dispersal-'

'Yes,' Lennart agreed with his junior; it was possible that Admonisher was warming up her hyperdrive just to make them think she was going to move out, and trick the fighters into not launching on her until it was too late; but there were other, actually two, good reasons to move.

'All fighters,' drawing a catchment area on the tactical map including both the attack groups heading for Admonisher, 'Black Prince Actual, countermand that. She'll be gone before your shot could reach. Fighter tactical division five, proceed to Ord Corban and reinforce the blockade there. Divisions two and three stand by for nav data.'

To his own chief controller he added, 'Sorry, Ol, but you can't see her hyperdrive from down there,' and on squadron com 'Fist, Dynamic; Admonisher is preparing to jump out to engage one of you. When she does, go full evasive - buy time for us to come up and join you.' And to the bridge team, 'Guns-'

There was a flare from the underside aft, and a crunch and kick as one clutch of bolts hit shielding, a couple burst through; the ship pitched slightly, helm reported and Lennart realised, 'Secondary engine' at the same time. Half a second later, another set of flares, starboard side midships forward of the turret line, one penetration, vapourisation flare.

'They've switched to half broadsides,' Rythanor reported, thinking about how this would change the odds- 'no recommendation.'

'Sensible,' Lennart acknowledged, meaning that it was a good move on the rebels' part.

'Helm'- sketching the beginning of a move they had done almost too often already, sideslip and roll to being back on target, but then extended out into a full corkscrew that broke back and out into an arching strafe.

Beware aesthetics, he thought. If it looks a smooth and beautiful curve, the enemy may see it that way too - and predict it that much more easily. We've both made mistakes because a move looked too right. 'Scarify that a bit, and fifteen hundred.'

The Imperial system of giving helm orders was, for all the drive to standardisation, still damnably confusing. Object driven was relatively easy - go to, dock with, not a problem.

In combat, if an order containing a proportion was given, say 'sixty-forty evasion', it meant that sixty percent of the ship's thrust was reserved to maintain the base course, and forty percent could be used for evasive manoeuvres. If one figure was mentioned it was a value in 'g'. Fifteen hundred was almost half Black Prince's total thrust, especially missing one secondary engine.

Most ships wouldn't be remotely capable of keeping their guns on target through that kind of radical evasion; she...actually couldn't, but years of practise had taught the gunners how to fire when the sights came on, and the helm crew how to give the gunners that chance.

The wave of green smashed into the rebel destroyer dorsal midships, breaking through the shielding - there was a double flare, overload and failure, theoretically repairable, but followed by the rumbling flash of the generator itself letting go. A hard, tactically irreparable breach.

Better yet, the point of impact was the forward of the two dorsal batteries. There was a scatter of wreckage before the secondary detonation; had they been that radical - shut down tensors and compensators, purposely wrecking the turret assembly to try to prevent a clear detonation?  
If they had, they had sacrificed the gun crews to protect the rest of the ship. One eighth of their firepower gone, a fifth of that which they could safely bring to bear on their primary target, and gaps in their defences now, on the bow and right in their best fire arc, which screamed 'exploit me.'

'Good,' Lennart said, 'but scan globes and manoeuvre thrusters would be more efficient targets.'

Before Wathavrah could protest, and express scepticism that anyone could think he had actually meant it, Lennart added 'Brenn, she's lining up on Fist. Warn Tevar and get the intercept course dialled in.'

Admonisher had turned to the best-compromise course between presenting her guns and lining up to make the jump, rotating side on.

Of her eight turret groups, two were dorsal centreline, one now gone; two underside centreline, one just aft and one just forward of the hangar complex. The other four clusters were upper surface, two either side of the superstructure. It was a good arrangement, and the main reason Shockwave-class destroyers weren't more widespread was that they were, in practise, overweight - too big and too slow.

In theory, they could be brought down reliably, if not exactly easily, by their own weight and cost in Imperator-class. That usually meant four ships.

Admonisher's ventral batteries came back into circuit, and added their fire. One salvo from Black Prince missed - aiming at the ventral batteries, on the edge of the outline, the heavy destroyer twisted the other way;

Admonisher's fire scattered individual bolts across the starboard side, losing focus and power priority. Her parting shot as she made lightspeed was a clean miss; Black Prince's, before she moved to pursue, was a solid hit - in the hangar bay, and drop ship complex, largely empty and without much left to land back on anyway.

Admonisher made lightspeed. Black Prince was five seconds behind her; the Imperial hyper capable fighters had a brief reprieve, but the rebels were strung out widely, under fire from the light and customs corvettes and taking losses.

Astromechs. A bad idea, for the very simple reason that they could not hold that many courses, stripped away all the tactical flexibility hyperdrive was supposed to give. The cut price navigation rig bolted into the B-wing was even worse; only able to store two or three paths, depending on how recently built. They had no vector out, and no way to survive, unless they could kill off the Imperial escorts firing on them and buy enough time for somebody to get a plot together.

They could probably manage to do some damage - maybe not enough to survive, but there were a lot of warhead capable craft in there, and Rontaine's customs ships were not long for this world. Unless someone else, like a fighter squadron or twenty, decided to derive the rebels of their blaze of glory. Vehrec broadcast to his own charges, 'You know, I fancy alphabet stew. Let's go kill them.'

Voracious and Hialaya Karu were seventy degrees apart as seen from Mon Evarra and widening. That would have been a bad move against a healthy Mon Cal ship; against a cripple it made all too much sense. Mon Evarra could no longer keep them both against her best arc, the relatively heavily armed and shielded bow; soon, one or other of them would be able to engage on the blasted-open starboard side, or the inherently weak port where the hangar bay was.

Of course, keeping intact shields towards them would stop being an issue soon, when they rebel ran out of shielding.

Follow Admonisher, into one giant melee? Maybe, but not with these two on her tail.

Falldess hadn't really been that badly shot at, yet. That changed as Mon Evarra turned the bulk of her remaining effective firepower on Hialaya Karu. She was firing bursts, a few guns at a time, accurate and burning into the shields, but the Imperials had a lot more to lose than Mon Evarra had left.

What plans could the Alliance ship possibly have? Did she simply intend to go down fighting? That made no sense from the military, or rebel, point of view. Doing something insanely dumb because they believed the Force was with them, that was just about believable. This? Not really.

Ah, Falldess thought. They're waiting for one of us to get overeager and stupid. Pick off that one and it's a fair fight again. The rebel commander appears to be a determined man - well, amphibian, then. Done this many times, enough to believe that dead weight may set the odds but it has nothing to do with what number actually comes up.  
He'll fight it out to the last, and hope for some turn of fortune to swing things back his way - such as one of us losing the plot and deciding to sail straight and level to make a better firing platform.

Most of the fire is coming my way, because I haven't been that heavily shot at yet, and he wants to see how jittery I am, whether he can spook me into doing something so dumb.

Voracious was here sooner, has been much more heavily shot at along the way; more likely to be tired enough to make a mistake.

'Helm,' she ordered, 'bring us down to a gentle flat lateral weave, let it look like we're being stupid, then hard turn away.' Get the rebel to over-react and move too soon, she hoped.

Mon Evarra was not about to let a chance like that go; yawed slightly, let loose one full volley, blindingly fast. Too fast for Hialaya Karu to react.

She was still playing dumb when the salvo hit, mostly in the bow - there was a reason most destroyers carried relatively little of importance there. Outpost emplacement materials, one hyperdrive node, main navigational shielding - the most serious problem but as long as the combat shields were intact, they could substitute.

Mon Evarra took a second shot, but too late - Hialaya darted away more radically than Falldess had ordered, the helm team taking that on themselves and quite right too. Mon Evarra turned away, Falldess held the manoeuvre, continuing high-thrust turns while waiting for the rebel trick to reveal itself, but the stream of purple fire really did reach out for Voracious.

Playing switching games, Falldess thought, keeping us off balance, and its eye comes back in damnably fast each time. Two main fire control teams, keeping a running solution on each of us?

And on the lighter craft. Obdurate made the move first. Tythallin followed, a swooping curve across the rebel destroyer's stern. Still covered by shielding, but there was always that tiny space that couldn't be shielded, directly over the thrust stream.

Obdurate had been busy already, and it was a fairly good day to be a frigate; faced with inflicting loss by shooting at the smaller ships, or trying to damage the larger ships that had been hurting them, the rebels had decided not to go for damage and body count that would serve no tactical purpose.

Unless you were one of the few frigate types that actually carried heavy turbolasers. Then you were a viable target.

Obdurate passed at a tangent, high speed and maximum possible aspect change, firing groups of shot at Mon Evarra's engine vents; Janduvar Tythallin followed doing the same, and both drew counterfire.

Mon Evarra could only spare the power and sink capacity for MTL at the moment, and laid down a wall of fire that looked much more impressive than it as. Demolishers were tougher than that; it would take time to erode them away with that, but Obdurate kept moving anyway. Tythallin steadied down to be able to aim more precisely.

Not good. Some rebel fire control officer saw the easy target, made a case for it, and got the power allocation he wanted - four of the after guns fired, scoring two hits on Tythallin, eroding shields, but no burnthrough, not yet. Tythallin's fire pattern broke up, splattering shot all across the rebel's stern, shielding thin enough that a couple of bolts did hit structure, but landed on bracing and ablatives - one splitting open a water tank, but not a lethal matter.

The rebel's aft guns paused, Tythallin started to curve away, then the reb lashed out again and landed a burst that did achieve burnthrough, into the forward superstructure and breaking the hangar bay open.

Obdurate had been splashing bolts off engine casings, vents, the fantail, and finally managed to land one bolt directly on target, passing straight up the ion stream - her own shields scintillating from it - into the absurdly traditional looking forcefield projector 'blades' of the ion turbine.

The engine blew out, exploding out of its housing in a burst of blue-white light; oh, they're not going to like me for that, Raesene thought - but Tythallin was stumbling, darting jerky moves as her engines fired seemingly at random. It didn't look like purposeful evasion, which was half the point, but she hadn't been that good going in.

Try to catch Mon Evarra's attention and draw fire away from Tythallin, run and leave her to it, or - no real choice, Raesene decided. Fortunately, Mon Evarra was under enough pressure from the two Imperial destroyers that she pulled the power available back to fore, port and starboard batteries.

Being sandpapered to death by a shower of MTL fire was a slightly more feasible prospect.

'Guns, counterfire. Helm, bring us around. I want to try to snag Tythallin on the tractor beams.'

There was more than one reason to try to do that; apart from pulling a sister ship out of trouble, he could still feel the distrust being radiated at him. Not from the crew - they knew what he had been dealing with, but from the officers of the rest of the squadron. He had played judas goat, had sold out the rest of the Starfleet or at least tried to, and at least part of the distaste radiating his way was from people who wished they had thought of it first.

Speed, in political warfare as well a actual, was vital; and they had still been gathering evidence when Lennart had moved and simply placed them both under military arrest, without a moment's visible doubt about the practicalities and legalities at all.

How would that have played out, if it had gone the other way? Operation placed on hold; wrangling back and forth; time wasted, enough to hide the evidence at least, enough legal wrangling to abort the whole business, and Black Sun and the Moff and his profiteers could continue on their merry way.

Maybe Lennart had expected his arresting two ISB agents to be overtaken by events, either dismissed as a minor matter or buried under so many more charges relating to Adannan that one more misdemeanour was just a triviality. Raesene had dealt with his problem, whether he had meant to or not, by passing it up the chain of command, and although he wasn't proud of that it was the way things had worked out. He doubted Lennart could do the same.

Another reason to make the move, and it was going to have to be a high-speed pickup, no deceleration to match velocity; the strain both ships would be vastly preferable to getting hit by another burst of heavy turbolaser fire.

There was a thud as the tractors reached out and grasped the load, and the noise - starships were not supposed to creak under the strain. There were creaking noises.

It took Raesene all of five seconds to start thinking it was a risk too far and wishing he didn't have to go through with it, but they were committed now - and besides, most of Mon Evarra's firepower was now pointed at Voracious.

The rebel destroyer had identified the Venator as their most profitable target. Voracious had not been in action for very long on any absolute scale, but long enough to have burned off almost a third of her fuel reserve, and a higher proportion than that of adrenalin.

Still, being shot at was a pick-me-up of a sort.

Penthesilea had survived for some time under the guns of Black Prince, but that had been a staged, tactically phased bombardment, intended to allow the rebel ship time to screw up.  
Mon Evarra was trying for a relatively cheap kill, the first shots of this volley splattering of the shields over the fighter bay, some missing ahead - trying for the torpedo bays, aiming to touch off the carried ordnance.

The next cheapest was probably the bridge module. Caliphant ordered more evasive moves. Always, on the holovids, the captain was able to call out something like 'Evasive Pattern Kappa Nine'- unfortunately, it didn't actually work like that.  
Between defections and slicing, any standard pattern would quickly become known to the other side. There was no shorthand. There were set patterns, but they were individual creations, with limited useful lives.

A hard evasive undulating bank, skidding against the dominant vector, and Caliphant waited for the crunch as bits of his ship fell off; there wasn't one, but there was a sequence of hammers as the rebel divided its active gun mounts into batteries almost without pause - existing organisation coming to the fore there.

The batteries scattered clusters of bolts across Voracious' path, landing one on the Imperial ship to the port side of the main bay door, leaving a glowing hole and door machinery damage.

'Kirritaine, do something about that?' Caliphant called down to this gunnery officer. 'Before Hialaya manages to steal our thunder.'

The Karu-class destroyer was lashing fire into the rebel, which had decided to block and evade as far as possible and concentrate on killing Voracious to even up the odds. What was left of the Mon Cal's shielding was facing the smaller Imperial destroyer, with the majority of her fire going into the Venator. That was a compliment of sorts, if a back handed one.

Voracious rolled to bear as Mon Evarra was expecting; not a perfect prediction though, a near-perfect straddle, bolts everywhere in a small volume of space around the Imerial destroyer, but no actual hits.

Caliphant thought about calling their bluff and staying put, but that was too stylised to be effective - a return salvo put four bolts into the Mon Cal ship, two solid hits, one port flank, on the edge of the hangar aperture and evidently hitting the pressure curtain - a shower of loose parts, air, storage modules and deck technicians flew out of the rebel ship.

The second hit was deep in the main body, over some piece of equipment - the almost red colour of the flare said a secondary reactor, but it was no tactical loss as Mon Evarra no longer had the heat sink capacity to afford to run it.

Voracious pulled her nose up and rolled to maintain fire arc, and Mon Evarra's immediate reply was spot on, a prediction of elegance. Sixteen of thirty bolts hit, and three burned through.

One in the base of the bridge tower - accomodation, there should be no-one there at battle stations, but another good hit there would expose the reactor. One on the port docking vestibule, blasting the door open and spilling logistics modules into the void. The third hit was the most potentially serious, up forward only one compartment from the torpedo bay - the hull was ripped open, but the additional layer of armour wrapped around mount and magazine protected them.

Voracious lobbed a salvo in return, Mon Evarra porpoised out of most of it - three hits, two burned through the outer layer of armour to be stopped by the inner, one smashed open a gun turret; the Imperial ship tried to sideslip out of the rebel's next shot, and roll to present her intact starboard side.

She was half way through the manoeuvre, showing her belly, when the rebel shot hit; not as many - the rebel had judged the turning point well, but fired a relatively open pattern. Three hits, one blasting straight through the starboard wing, one impacting on the opposite side of the ship directly 'under' the starboard turret line, one shearing off one of the sensor globes.  
Which was, absurdly enough, Imperial victory of a sort. Voracious was taking hits, heavy ones, but not enough damage, fast enough, to stop her pouring shot into Mon Evarra. It was time to leave.

The rebel destroyer turned to bring herself bows on to Hialaya Karu, and accelerated towards her. 'Kriff,' Caliphant cursed, captain's poise and decorum be damned, especially now. 'Helm, bring what's left to bear. Evade as you can, but first and foremost bring to bear.'

Hialaya Karu hadn't just had a main scanner shot off and the rest trying to reset themselves from shock damage; she could see Mon Evarra decide that the numbers she needed weren't happening - she was doing much less damage than she needed to - and that it was time to get out and do as much damage as possible along the way.

'Helm, put us athwart their course then lay us on the reciprocal. That ship is either going to ram, near-miss and scatter mines, or try a very short run to hyperspace. I want to meet them head-on.'

Alurin had to ask, 'Aye aye, Captain, but are you taking what happened last time into account?'

'Of course,' she said, confident sounding. 'Practise makes perfect.'

There was no real, sensible answer to that. Alurin confined himself to pointing out, 'They will keep firing on us throughout their approach.'

'I know.'

Mon Evarra was thrusting hard to bring her vector across Karu's predicted position - have to be either a ram or a scattering of mines.

They were only a couple of degrees off head on - a relatively easy shot for both ships, and each using what thrust it had to spare - Hialaya Karu had more freedom of manoeuvre - to slide round each other's gunsights, throw targeting off as far as possible.

Ignore the window, Falldess thought, although she could actually see molten glow of damage in the distance and the outline of an ion flare. Don't judge by hand and eye - you can't. Trust the map; it knows what its doing. Judging momentum and acceleration isn't so very different from judging wind and tide.

Of course it bloody is, but this is not a moment to be thinking that I can't do it, this is a moment to look and sound confident, for the crew's sake and my own.

'Rolling broadside,' she announced. The newer members of the crew, Dynamic's handoffs, looked baffled by that, but her own crew knew she meant a continuous ripple.

Mon Evarra was better at this, but she had lost a lot of capacity to give and take fire, and Hialaya Karu tearing into her from ahead and Voracious from astern were shredding her.

Karu was taking most of the rebel's fire still, and the deck jumped as a bolt hit, but the Mon Cal ship was hitting largely intact shields - two full salvoes or as full as she could manage, both sidestepped; one open sheaf that scattered shot all around them and left eroded shielding but no burnthrough, a few hits - portside, some real damage, but not enough to stop them.

'Helm, when I give the word,' Falldess said, 'I want you to bring this ship round as fast as she's ever answered. Main engine throttling I think you call it. Sixteen and a quarter point turn to starboard, then maximum acceleration, everything you have.'

In other words, try to break the bow off, Alurin thought, then if that doesn't work see what can be done about ramming the engines through the rest of the hull.  
'Understood,' he said, because the only other thing to be said would have constituted incitement to mutiny, and he didn't think a successful mutiny could be concluded in under five seconds.

A flash of tractor beam, a flush of air, and there were a shower of objects in their path - it looked as if Mon Evarra had jettisoned the contents of their ordnance bunkers more than laid an actual minefield. This was the moment.

'Helm, now,' Falldess ordered; the stars blurred past and the ship howled under the strain of the flash turn, and the ion wake flowed over and cooked off most of the hundreds of payloads' worth of fighter missiles and torpedoes Mon Evarra had released.

That and the ion wake covering the now nearly shieldless Mon Cal ship, searing off access hatchers and rangefinders, com and sensor clusters - not actually enough to stop her making hyperspace.

It was the salvo from Voracious, twelve heavy guns that tore the rebel's port quarter apart and knocked out three of the engines, that stopped Mon Evarra running.

She fired briefly at Hialaya Karu again - and what was left of the shower of fighter weapons splattered across the Imperial destroyer - but although there were hits, there was no real damage done.

'Helm,' Falldess ordered, 'Bring us back round to bear, so we can finish that off before Voracious manages to steal the credit.'

On Voracious' bridge, Caliphant was doing exactly that. His ship had shot at one of the outworlds, shot at One and Indivisible, shot at and been shot by Admonisher, and he wanted something of his own to kill now.

'Helm, get us closer, guns, maximum power. Let's get her before Hialaya Karu manages to steal the credit.'

Mon Evarra may have wanted to fight on, but considering the engines were shot, the shields were down, the hangar bay was blasted part way open, the sensors were compromised, and several parts of her structure were missing, it wasn't really a viable proposition. Surrender? Unlikely - but it seemed to be happening; the rebel reactivated a nav beacon, flashing white, and escape pods started to pop loose.

The rebel's reactor was still running, though, still generating full military power - and one of the secondaries had come back on line also.

What did the book say? Oh, yes. 'Hialaya Karu Actual to Mon Evarra, shut down your power plant. We are not obliged to accept your surrender unless you are no longer generating.'

Ten seconds, no reply, and more heat pouring out of the maimed rebel ship. If they were just buying time for their people to get out, then planning to self-destruct the ship, then… 'Main guns, one full salvo, aim for the reactor.'

Hialaya Karu was closer to the target, but as soon as he registered the fire directors pointing on again Caliphant gave the fire order to his own gun crews.

Voracious' salvo, less the two turrets still recovering from shock damage, splashed into the Rebel ship's hull a twentieth of a second ahead of Hialaya Karu's.

That, finally, was enough. Mon Cal cruisers did usually have to be battered to death, and this one was no exception. Even after the reactor had ruptured, there were still large, solid pieces of wreckage tumbling away.

There were many different ways the rRasfenoni could play this, and part of the responsibility of the flag officer's staff was to game it out, see what the enemy could do with what they had, and plan accordingly.  
Admiral Lord Nathanael Convarrian on the Tichy had come to the conclusion that the most effective thing the seven-limbed aliens could do would be to simulate a small civil war. Appear to fall out among themselves over what they had done, dissociate part of the race from the rest - it was about the only way they could expect to get away with shooting at Imperial ships on one hand, and look innocent on the other.

It might even be true. It was unlikely the majority of the race knew what had been going on; they were insidious, they got everywhere - colonies and settlers and outposts dotted the sector - but if the briefing material that had been scraped together was anything to go by, they had done a lot of and were proud of their part in disaster relief work.  
The fact that special detachments of their own armed forces had been responsible for many of these disasters had apparently not sunk in to the general consciousness.

At any rate, the greatest contribution the rRasfenoni armed services could make to the survival of their species now was probably to start shooting at each other. Create a cloud of chaos and confusion, blur the lines of responsibility. Use that opportunity to start lobbing shot at the Imperial ships, see what they were up against and if any kind of defensive victory was actually possible; if not, the murderers who had besmirched the name of their race - or a reasonable imitation thereof - would be handed over, and a certain amount of disarmament would occur, complicated by the usual maze of lies that it was the intelligence services' job to see through.

The days when a world or group of worlds could hope to be more trouble than they were worth to hold were over; the practise of backing out of operations that involved no tangible return had been a security disaster, a significant encouragement to a generation of rebels and pirates.  
Never mind the enemy; the Empire had come close to being done in by its own accountants. The policy had been an artefact of post clone war reconstruction, less out of real need to economise than a kind of dazed austerity-at-all-costs, whatever-it-takes thinking had simply gone out of fashion.

Well, now it was back, and welcome. A policy of parsimony - normalisation - had proven to be extremely expensive in terms of officers' careers, and most were glad to see a more energetic policy.

The rRasfenoni could not conceivably expect to fight and win against what the Empire could bring to bear against them. What they had done would leave them no allies they could call on, military or political, and was enough to justify taking their worlds by force and a complete change of government.

There was no input from higher authority; the sector governor - a full Moff - was under arrest, and the special assistant to the privy council had been caught doing something he ought to be arrested for. The Ubiqtorate hadn't reacted to that one yet; they could surely intercept the com pulses between ships of the support group, had noticed that a line officer had somehow managed to catch a high official proclaiming his intent to commit treason, and hadn't done anything? Lag, perhaps, time to verify, time to play the political game.

Or sheer disbelief, there was always that possibility. Still, Lennart had made enough noise that surely something would happen.

It hadn't yet, so far there had been no directives forthcoming from higher authority of any kind, so this was going to be a purely naval operation. The chief object of which was to crack the rRasfenoni home and major worlds' defences fast enough to prevent them destroying enough of the evidence to protect the guilty.

As such, the job was time critical. First Battle Squadron would disperse into its subunits and target the eight largest and most probable colony worlds, begin assault if the shields were down and blockade if not. First Battlecruiser Squadron were the heavy interdiction element, and they would orbit the trade lanes, intercept rRasfenoni mobile forces and any rebels still moving in or out-sector.

Tichy himself would strike for the rRasfenoni homeworld.

Sindavathar were a heavy outfit; they were very low on the list for recieving a new-build Executor because there were many other lighter formations that needed the reinforcement much more.

BS1 consisted of two of the horn-prowed Corellian built Aquila class battle carriers, two balanced standard-heavy kuati Temperor class with their distinctive oversized comms and sensor domes rising out of the cortex, four bristlingly-armed heavy corellian Prolocutors; diverse, but effective.  
BCS1 was more homogenous, four bulge-bellied Procurators, designed for long range, open space search and destroy, two compact, heavily armoured Praetors which filled out the other part of a battlecruiser's duties, fast manoeuvring wing to the fleet.

Battlecruiser designs tended to come in pairs; the previous generation had been the Ultor and Adversor classes, the Ultor the fleet flanker and Adversor distant hunter-killer.

The very latest were the Vengeance, known unofficially to most as the 'scarecrow' or 'ooga booga' class - huge in dimensions, terrifying in appearance, but almost hollow - very little mass and power to show for their size.

Ultors were the same length - give or take a couple of hundred metres - as the standard Sector class heavy cruiser, but they were a classic wedge hull, solid shapes solidly built as opposed to the Sector's thin prime hull and humpback superstructure. On average, an Ultor would take a Sector class cruiser out reliably; it would be closer than their designations suggested but that was the way it always worked out on exercise.

A Vengeance class so-called battlecruiser could not reliably do the same, had difficulty handling the medium Admiral class cruisers, and would be torn apart by the main force Ultor which was two thirds its length and one sixth the target profile. They were notoriously combat-unworthy, a personal commission of a man high in the Imperial hierarchy who knew much about impressions and intimidation, and very little about warship design.

They were, in theory, fast hunters. Their fleet-wing counterpart, though, looked to be something distinctly successful - a potentially much more effective design.

Anyway, those were the pieces, and the battle-play could begin.

The battleships and their escorts emerged first, and simultaneously. All but one to find raised planetary shields and alerted defences; the single exception was the Aquila-class Goshawk, over the colony planet Plr'lanilthre - at the root of one of their minor trade routes, a junction world and major port - and that lack of shields was instantly suspect.  
Still, the instructions were clear. If they seem to offer an avenue of attack that's too good to be true, spring the trap. There was enough firepower in the rest of the squadron to come and break them out.

There were a handful of orbital facilities, minor, large groundside ports - here they could be kept safely under the shield bubble. A lot of small orbitals, colony cylinders and spheres, most of which were moving away under station keeping thrusters - but far too many satellites for a world with any decent technology. Disguised minefield? Likely.

Goshawk blasted out at the surfaceside shield generators - of seven immediately within reach, three died; the other four saved themselves by getting some kind of energy barrier up fast enough to take the opening volley, but the partially raised shields vented so much heat into the planet there were now four lakes of lava with raised pinnacles in the centre.

There was a gap. Enough to send transports down to ground through, enough to start an assault on the rest of the planet - although dealing with those four shield generators was going to be interesting. Landing barges had enough heat resistance to float on lava, and suddenly there was the concept of AT-ATs punting their way across the molten sea.

The planetary defence batteries returned fire, an interesting mix of autoblasters, ion cannon, kinetic accelerators and conventional turbolasers - a defence weighted far above the usual, expectable destroyer scale attack, but not enough to deal with a heavy carrier.

The Aquilas were actually a lot closer, functionally, to qualifying as battleships than the huge open-undersided Conducor class the Starfleet rated as such; half sisters to the heavy, minimal-bay Prolocutor class, they were thoroughly hated by most of their pilots. They had kept most of the internal bracing and framework, their hangar bay was notoriously cramped, subdivided and awkward to fly through, and traffic control within was a nightmare.

Above the usual six squadron Imperial Wing, it ran Group, three to eight wings, Command, four to twelve groups, Force, three to eight commands - a minimum of two hundred and sixteen and a maximum of four thousand six hundred and eight squadrons to a Force, usually around the low thousand mark, thousand and eighty being the most common.

Huge variance, but it allowed for radical differences in individual quality, in terrain controlled.

Aquila-class carriers took a complete Command under an Aerospace Vice-Marshal, ten Groups each of eight Wings, four hundred and eighty squadrons.

Not the end of it, because further back in the landing stage ridden bays they managed to give room to the landers, armour and logistics of a sixty-four division Army Group.

'Aerospace force? I feel more like an air molecule, trying to figure my way out through the alveoli' had been one test pilot's comment, and even if not consciously inspired, the design of the bay was certainly reminiscent of the human lung.

In theory, that was enough deployable ground and air power stored in the convolutions to take the planet, and they had a gap in the shields to make the attempt through.

That was the intention, right up to the moment when the floating low-orbit shields activated. The planet didn't have a second course of shielding - few could afford protection to that degree - but it did have backup generators ready to switch in to the main shield bubble, most of them in low orbit and some way disguised.

The effect was to cage Goshawk, below the outer reaches of the bubble, isolated from her support group and easily contained, easily accessible to the surface guns and the swarm of atmospheric fighters - thousands, tens of thousands - coming up at her.

She would need all of her fighters to hold that lot off, and help do enough damage to the planetary shields and defence batteries to let Goshawk break out - the big ship felt literally like a fish in a barrel, only about twenty times her own length from surface to shield bubble; or to let the escorts break in to support her.

If the rRasfenoni did reinforce, and there was a suspicious lack of presence that indicated their mobile forces were being held back for such an opportunity - improbable as it seemed, were they actually trying to pick and win a fight? Take on the Starfleet?

There was a certain elegance to their military plan - apart form it being politically insane, of course. Unless they actually thought that by putting up a competent fight against the regional support group, they could look good enough to recruit rather than kill off.

It was unlikely that their past crimes would be overlooked - but was it impossible? Uncomfortably, no. Anyway, for the moment, Goshawk would have to survive as best she could, until a detachment - a Battlecruiser division, probably the Praetors, could arrive on the other side of the shield and start breaking Goshawk out.

Or possibly Tichy might be able to do it, if all went well. The dreadnaught's attack plan presupposed raised shields; it would get very messy otherwise.

The escorts actually emerged first, trigger the tripwires, get whatever trap they had arranged to begin its play.

Tichy's support group was the Sector class heavy cruiser Validusia, the Starburst class heavy cruiser-carrier Lyrae, the Urbanus- class light cruisers Mount Helicon and Lindowal Bay, two Proelium heavy destroyers and eight line destroyers - relatively credible for an attack in their own right.

The planetary shields went up - typically, some of the most heavily shielded worlds in the galaxy were those that least needed it, but happened to have the money to hand to spend. Coruscant was the only really major world whose shields got a regular workout. Most of the planets that really needed heavy shielding, in the turbulent mid and outer rim, were exactly the ones that had trouble affording it.

Here? Suspiciously heavy - overweight, which was evidence of no worse than a slight racial tinge of paranoia. In theory.

The escort group began to deploy for a slow, time consuming probing bombardment over one hemisphere, leaving a conspicuous hole in the centre of the formation.

The rRasfenoni, looking at that, would - should - think something else was about to emerge there - the tactics fitted a torpedo sphere - and prepare against it. That was what Convarrian wanted them to do.

There were signatures moving beneath the shields, atmospheric and near orbit fighters waiting to be given an opportunity, and a worryingly large number of currently inert satellites in close orbit.

The Empire sprung their trap first. Instead of the new contact emerging in the centre of the formation, Lindowal Bay sprinted for that gap, sidestepping the charging dreadnaught that descended from hyperspace.

Tichy wasn't aiming for the centre, as that would have been suicidal; he was aiming for a skin-kissing flyby of the planetary shield bubble, cutting it to kilometres' distance, at half lightspeed.

Two volleys of light and medium turbolaser to clear the orbital space - a number of the satellites went up in a manner that indicated warheads or energy weapon capacitor banks, and none managed to survive that kind of firepower.

Then Tichy performed a backflip, swinging his stern in towards the planet at closest approach, rolling to face back along her previous course and present alpha gun arc to the other side of the planet.

As the bow came up, the tractor and manipulator beams of the towing rig used that to slingshot the under-tow Keldabe down towards the planet to smash into the shields, and accelerate it on its way.

The light destroyer hit the planetary energy bubble with a kinetic energy equivalent not far short of a thousand petatons, followed immediately by full converged sheaf fire from the escort group.

The impact sent a translucent bluish-violet ripple around the skies of the world, flaring red-green-gold auroral displays where the ripples of the impact pushed the shield down into the upper atmosphere.

The shielding screamed, flared and wavered trying to take the load; if the escort group could turn that into an actual breach, excellent - there was a significant possibility, it was not a small shock, momentum transferred to the shield generators could rip them apart, momentum transferred through them to the planet would spawn earthquakes not seen since coalescence.

The energy requirements for that were gargantuan; so had the impact been.

It was actually the ripples Tichy was interested in. The planetary defence command would be frantically trying to bleed off and stabilise the shielding around the impact point; but the antipodeal point, on the other side of the planet where the shock and distortions converged…

Dropping something heavy on a planet, flying past and striking at the contre-coup was a new trick to most; it had been born in the clone wars, had moderate success only and never really reached widespread notoriety. If the rRasfenoni had ever heard of it, they reacted too little and too late.

Tichy identified the weakest point relatively easily; under such stresses it was obvious. His full array of heavy turbolasers lashed out, burned away a hole in the energy envelope - started spraying the planetary surface underneath, superheavies thrashing into and peeling back the shield; the rRasfenoni were still trying to work out what had temporarily driven down one panel of the shielding when the generator complex died. Then another six.

The ripples from that hole being carved in the defences reverberated around the planet again - and the escort group managed to tear their gap after all. Wide open, two gaping holes and wrecked generators under them.

The disadvantages of the operation had been understood and accepted; with the speed the projectile had to be delivered at, the deploying ship could not possibly remain in the area. It was a one shot deal that left Tichy outbound at half the speed of light, useless to even try to decelerate in tactical time - but the planet hopelessly vulnerable and shock damaged, ripe for invasion.

The escort group between them could muster forty divisions, sixty-six fighter wings. Should be enough, which left Tichy the option of making another firing pass on the planet and cleaning out more of the orbital space, or proceeding to Plr'lanilthre to back Goshawk up.

If that was their designated point of resistance, where they were making their maximum effort to convince the Empire that they were capable enough to be useful and shouldn't be exterminated after all, while the other worlds - and there were indeed reports of fighting coming in, crossfire between rRasfenoni forces - played the political game, then it was clearly Tichy's job to go there.

Redirect the battlecruisers to back up the invasion effort over the mainworld, fFenar, then go to this colony world and break their back and make them pay.

On the flag bridge, Adannan was still hopelessly baffled by what he saw - but could make more sense of what he could overhear being thought. Lennart himself was still a jumble, a tangle of connections and conceptions in every direction, and either he didn't know how to shield or he was simply too busy to.  
No, no, of course; that would be it. He was broadcasting inadvertently, scattering thoughts and ideas across the crew. It wasn't a deliberate active connection, nothing was being forced, and if he was right Lennart was also, however subconsciously, listening to how they reacted.

Whether he knew it or not, the Force was with him, but not in the manner of traditional battle meditation. That constituted, as far as the dark acolyte knew, one Force user dreaming of war and infusing the rest of their command with that, in a forcing out, a projection of ideas. It could improve coordination, sharpen skills - it was a superb preventer of errors - but it did suppress by supplanting the individual will and aggression of the crew who fought under it.

Much as it pained a Force user to admit it, battle meditation was not the be-all and end-all of fleet operations. Even the current master of the form, Grand Admiral Declann, had lost fleet exercises; usually to opposing commanders who took the risk of dividing their command, allowing elements to operate independently, and presenting a more complicated problem than one mind could easily grasp.

To Adannan, the solution was conceptually straightforward. Dissolve the will of some of the crew, slave their brains to your own and use them as co-processors, problem solved.

It seemed to be too complicated a task to do while actually in combat, though, and Declann had lost exercises to the complexityholic alien Thrawn, to Lord Vader who could overmatch him in the Force in any case, and to a handful of up and coming junior flag officers, among them Rear-Admiral Stephan Rawlin. Hmmm.

Lennart was sincere in his belief that he did not have the Force, he couldn't possibly be aware of what he was doing or it would change him, his personality would be different.

So it would probably be a good idea to tell him.

Other Imperial forces? Yes, reinforcements would be welcome. They could hardly be less obedient than this infuriating man, and might possibly be of use in keeping him down.

So, how was the timing of this going to go, and when did the military element end and the political - or purely personal - begin? Move in on the planet as soon as possible, ideally, destroy Admonisher outright, free up the ground forces. Speed was not particularly of the essence, he realised; poise was.

Adannan sighed, remembering his original plan - blackmail a line officer, intimidate the crew, steal the medical logs from the 118th fleet that were the only place, beside their dead creators and even Palpatine wasn't that good, to learn the secrets of loyalty programming and how to subvert it.

Move out, fade away and take the time to study them in detail and decide how to use what he had. So simple. The only problem was Jorian Lennart.  
Well, and about forty-seven thousand of his friends. Sacking the renegade line officer, taking his command and his world away from him, would be a wonderful revenge, but was it really the best use? He would make a damned awkward apprentice. Kill him and blame him for…ah, that would be good. A clean, satisfying solution. Murder him, shift the blame, take the secrets and run. Or, for that matter, eliminate the entire ship. The Empire wasn't exactly short of destroyers; he could afford to squander one or two.

The timing was going to be critical. While the first ground assault was in progress would be best.

That might take a while yet to arrange. Fist did have enough sensor capacity in working order to spot the incoming Rebel, and decided to make a stand. Run? Delaying action? They were a destroyer, a fighting ship. No.  
Most of Tevar's crew were behind her in that decision, now that they had tasted blood. Was her ship not of the same class as the flag, the mainstay of the Imperial fleet, ton for ton the best the Empire had to offer? She had no intention of running. Not now, not again.

Fist's sensors registered the inbound as a blur of curdled space, between EW and deliberately running the drive rough to obfuscate the emergence point.

'Helm, he's trying to fake us out. Let's not make it easy for them, I want to meet him bows on, so bring us about.' They could get behind that at least - as long as Admonisher hadn't added an extra layer of deception, and was screening a false entry point. Doublethink.

Against the squadron flag, they would certainly have gone that far. Against Fist- why would they miss a trick?

They didn't. Project a false drop point, make it look just a shade too good, as if they could be planning to come out of it anyway. Fisthad turned away from that, pointing her bows insystem, expecting that it was a trick; and it was, a triple trick. The fake was a fake after all; it looked too good to be true because it was true. The heavy renegade destroyer emerged from the burble of curdled space exactly where it had seemed to be about to, outsystem of Fist.

Both ships were stern-on to each other - Admonisher had been expecting that; Tevar hadn't but her Imperator was far more manoeuvrable.

If Captain Tevar had been following instructions as given, she would have accelerated away, zig-zagging to avoid fire until the flag was there to support her, but confidence and adrenalin said otherwise.

Fist swung round hard on the thrust of her secondary engines, and stared into a blindingly bright cloud of jamming; Admonisher dipped her nose and yawed, making a move like a half turn of a helix, close to the edge of her manoeuvre envelope in bringing her dorsal arc to bear.

Black Prince and the rebel heavy had both tried their best to fake each other out with electronic warfare - the term was crazily insufficient in this day and age, but it still applied - neither ship had actually managed much in the way of deception. Each could read the other's moves too well, and the kind of subtlety they were both attempting functioned much more effectively when they weren't simultaneously charging in guns blazing.

Here, Admonisher hoped to sow enough chaos on the first exchange to land disabling hits quickly enough to put Fist out of the fight, cripple her now, finish the flag and then turn on her.

It was actually the loyalist who got the first shot in - a string of four tracking across the big renegade, one landing on unshielded hull. Wreckage and damage, ploughing in to the right of the blasted-out turret cluster, spilling molten metal and air, but not penetrating deep enough to reach the vitals.

Admonisher fired battery groups, eight hundred and forty teratons each - and two managed to connect. One widely enough spread that the shields took it, one concentrated enough to burn through, dismounting two axial defence turrets and smashing open the forward superstructure - living quarters decks.  
That was the opening. There would be worse to come; Tevar knew that a stand-up fight with the much larger rebel destroyer was, on the face of it, a losing plan. So fight it out here at close quarters and hold long enough for the squadron to arrive, or...

The rebel ship flared her bow steering thrusters; the sensor crew though it looked wrong, too wide, flat and hollow. They weren't fast enough to stop sensor interpretation sending that to fire control.

Admonisher's engines vented a billow of hot ions that went nowhere, no stream, and Fist's crew couldn't stop their automatic systems making the mistake Admonisher wanted them to. Gunnery assumed Admonisher was going to turn, predicted and laid the guns on accordingly, and missed wildly. Admonisher capitalised on that by landing another set of bursts.

One hit the starboard brim trench quad. It exploded, the capacitor banks let go, and Fist was shoved to one side by the blast. Helm started to stabilise out, but Tevar yelled at them 'No, roll with it-' and she was right. Fist extended out into a diving spiral that took her clear of Admonisher's followup converged sheaf.

If that salvo had hit it would have torn out their central main engine, at least. Fist stabilised out and started to return fire, Admonisher switched to sequential fire. Surer, with a higher average hit rate, but it meant they were no longer trying for the cheap kill.

That meant - what? Their opinion of her had gone up? Infuriating bastards, Tevar thought, then realised that they would be trying to play with her head, too.

Practically speaking, her advantages were? Speed, for a start. Fist was over a thousand 'g' faster - that value had changed as bits were blown off both ships, but it was roughly so.  
She was also a smaller target- 60% of the length, and differently proportioned, leaner and a much smaller target cross- section. That should be a factor, that and Admonisher had higher physical, but couldn't have unlimited mental endurance.

Considering that she had been basically held in check by Black Prince, been unable to pin down any others of the Imperial squadron long enough to inflict critical damage, they had fought very hard for very little, and they had to be feeling at least a little drained and depressed.

They would probably welcome a straight up pounding match, the sort of hammering work that she was tempted to give them - but which the molten crater in the side of her ship and the jangled mess visible from the bridge windows argued against. What would work?

Opening the range, and moving out to at least a medium-range, high speed manoeuvring battle, keep running Admonisher ragged, waste the renegade's energy literal and psychological.

The Imperator-class took a lot of stick from amateur analysts who didn't understand why their turrets were mounted in two rows one either side of the superstructure; it was for range control. A side-firing ship has the advantage of being able to literally fly circles around its target, closing in or widening out as the situation dictated. A ship with only forward weapons can't do that; it has much less freedom of manoeuvre, has to close the range, has to be predictable.

The ideal solution was probably a centreline dorsal and ventral battery, which was - another flare of shot around Fist, and a stream of response - a worry for another moment.

'Helm, base course RA+11.24.17,' Tevar ordered. Out, at a tangent to the planet's orbit, eighty degrees off Admonisher's bearing. Crabbing out sideways, probably the best option to keep Admonisher in play - and keep them from killing her - until the flag arrived.

That was going to be an interesting move. Admonisher would be very wary of being faked out again, would immediately attempt to counterambush; Lennart, of course, was aware of that, and so the doublethink went.

Admonisher detected the curdling of space that went with a high relativistic mass just the far side of the light barrier; preparing a very high speed reentry, was he? Had to be faked. It was in the wrong place; when all doublethink failed, 'How will this serve my purpose?' was a good yardstick.

That entry point would put Black Prince out of mutually supporting range with Fist- enable the flag to give crossfire, maybe, but not what they were expecting. Which of course made it possible, but - ah. There was a trail away, a move on towards Fist. That made more tactical sense, and Admonisher rolled to cover that approach.

One wrinkle in the brain too many, or was it too few? Admonisher couldn't be everywhere at once, couldn't cover all the possibilities. She was sold the dummy dummy that she was expecting, the fake was indeed a fake - and the false trail, the projection? Decoy.  
Black Prince emerged from hyperspace through the ripples of warped space, dragging her back, straining the ship's systems - it would have been called a botched entry in any other circumstances, grounds for an inquiry, but Lennart was trading off stress for position, and got the advantage he wanted. Low and astern on Admonisher.

The rebel knew what Black Prince had done with a firing position like that before; started to turn hard towards the Imperial ship, minimal forward motion, spinning on main engines in place, not fast enough.

There was only one possible fire order, and Lennart thought it, it had got as far as his tongue, but there certainly had not been time to have it issued or acted on when it happened anyway. The Imperial destroyer's guns crashed out in a converged sheaf, time on target salvo at Admonisher's point of turn.

Good, Lennart thought, intelligent anticipation in action. He also thought he heard a faint scream from the direction of the flag bridge, but no matter, not now.

'This should be the endgame,' he said before the salvo had even hit, 'call the squadron in, 120 degree arc around Admonisher, us as centre, Fist as one endpoint, not too precise.'

He was still talking when the salvo hit Admonisher starboard and aft, the direction she had been swinging in, smashing into the armoured skin over her engines.

The Shockwave-class had five main engines, slightly staggered to take account of the superstructure, and eight secondaries. The outer starboard main engine blew apart, blasted open the bulkhead and sent splinters and concussion through the inner starboard wrecking it, obliterated two of the secondaries and wrecked two more. Admonisher was lamed, unable to turn to starboard, unable to accelerate away and pick her fights, unable to manoeuvre out of the way of incoming fire.

Unsurprisingly, she lashed out in return, pitching and trolling to bring all seven remaining turret groups to bear - and receiving a volley in the nose for her trouble that overpenetrated to the forward secondary bay - but landing two sets of bolts on Black Prince, one aft on the side of the superstructure - beneath the bridge tower - and one upper starboard side adjacent to a previous hit, and to the forward end of the starboard turret row.

Starboard-1 was hit directly, knocked out, possibly repairable, starboard-2 was wrenched off the mounting, definitely fixable but not in combat. It was a fair enough trade - ideally no trade at all, but that was what had happened.  
Lennart took note of it, fed it into his estimates of the situation, didn't need to direct damage control, already on their way.

Fist was moving outwards to a more balanced attack range; Admonisher was still turning slowly, her manoeuvre jets trying to stop her, and her guns came on to bear.

Tevar feinted starboard, initially a level turn, then dipped the port wing and firewalled the starboard engines to shove the bow down and over, and then brought port up to speed. Admonisher fired a single pattern that Fist just got clipped by - one more hit in the axial battery, one forward on the upper hull over the secondary hangar.

Tevar winced as the hits went in, and ordered an extended S-turn as Admonisher stabilised herself out, firing off a volley into empty space for the sake of the recoil.

The heavy renegade stabilised with her bow facing between the two Imperial destroyers.

Correction, five, as the rest of the squadron arrived on Brenn's beacon signal and lined up to engage.

The Imperial fighter elements had reduced down to two groups now, both mixed, one orbiting Ord Corban and occasionally lobbing heavy rockets down to try out a new trick they had invented. Lob a heavy warhead at the ground at the edge of a theatre shield bubble. Fuse it for delay detonation. Watch as the fountain of dirt and rock the subterranean detonation threw up splattered all over the shield bubble, and stood a good chance of bringing it down from sheer volume of impact. Not exactly reliable, but a much better chance than firing the thing directly at the shield.

They were enjoying themselves playing with that, and the other team was clustered around what was left of the rebel fighter force from One and Indivisible and Admonisher, where the site of the first clashes had been, and there still was a little drifting wreckage.

The Imperial force was engaged, and in free chase, when,  
'Group Captain?' Vehrec got a com call from his ad hoc chief of staff. 'We detect a burst transmission to the Alliance fighters, looks like a set of nav codes. We have a point of origin and, wait one, order coming through. Pursue and destroy.'

Vehrec started to swear, then said 'Wait. This is an antiship strike? On a target that actually has a reason not to move, and just might hang around long enough for us to nail it?'

'I believe so. Elements are to detach - Black Prince's Starwing and Hunter squadrons are to detach and rendezvous with the squadron for precision strike work, but otherwise it's a go. Course uploading now.'

The rebels had to fight their way clear, the hyper-capable Imperials didn't. They could turn and go, leaving a cloud of /ln and /Int to finish the Alliance light forces.

The rebel 'retrieval carrier' was simply the largest ship they could acquire on 'everything's going to stang' notice, and it was escorted by the ship they had sent to capture it, a Quaestor-class medium corvette more commonly seen nowadays as a prison ship. Decent light weapons fit - comparable to a Nebulon-B, from a fighter's point of view. Their LTL were a bit heavy for antifighter work, and they carried a battery of ion cannon.

For a fighter squadron, an interestingly challenging opponent. For twenty? Not really. The carrier itself was a KDY Super Transport - the largest of the medium freighter types, and not a ship that usually went unescorted - although in the sector, that was not a given.

A few ion scars, main loading doors open, and a handful of small craft - its own container managers and load lifter tugs around it, waiting to retrieve any damaged rebels.

The actual attack promised to be simplicity itself. The few moments of confusion aboard the carrier were enough for Vehrec to order 'ATRs, target the escort, all others the carrier, maximum rate ripple launch, go.'

The Quaestor immediately opened fire, spraying ion and laser fire across the Imperial formation, a blind area shoot at first- back to normal for most, but there were still some two hundred Imperial craft, an overwhelming weight of fire even if most of them did only have a few torpedoes left.

Actually, their main problem was each other - avoiding sideswiping each other while trying to line up a shot, avoiding launching a warhead that hit one of the bombardment stream ahead of you, leaving each other enough room to evade targeted fire - that was a problem, and not everyone got it right.  
One wide burst, hitting three and near-missing thirty, then the rebel ion cannon paused for a second, and swung onto the targets they identified as Imperial leadership. A sensible move, although once the rounds were away one that had more to do with revenge than survival.

Vehrec's ESM screamed at him, he rolled and dived, trying to outjink their predictors, zigged upwards, trying not to overrun the wave of heavy, slow warheads in front of him and hoping the fighters behind him remembered their procedures well enough to stay out of his way - one of the ion bolts aimed at him flew past and hit an Avenger. The weapon powercells split and detonated, and Vehrec felt the thump and saw the wash of red light in the cockpit as a lump of debris - probably a gun barrel - hit one of his engines.

Stang, he thought, but I can cope with this - reached down to turn off the autoeject with one hand while trying to stabilise and keep dodging with the other - too slow. The system disagreed with him that he could manage the problem, and punched him out. The cockpit blew out and the seat fired.

Well, thank you very kriffing much, he thought on his first tumble as it brought him back in sight of his fighter; one engine smashed, wing partially melted, but still there.

It occurred to him that he was floating, in a light standard-issue flight suit, in open space not very far away from what was about to be a multi teraton detonation.

Oh, kriff, he thought and curled up into a ball. Why does the Empire have to use black flight suits? Four TIEs flashed by him, uncomfortably close. The rebels have the right idea there, bright orange, then I might not get splattered like a mynock on a windshield by one of my own pilots, or roasted in an engine trail.

Better yet, he thought as his tumble brought the reb improvised carrier into view, how about flash-reflective white?

The corvette protecting the carrier tried to manoeuvre into position to physically intercept the stream of warheads - a sacrificial defence; but not effective. The Imperial fighters had too large a sensor baseline, too many electronically capable small craft backing them up, and the carrier was only a merchant class target.

The wave of heavy torpedoes parted and flowed around the corvette; of the hundred or so warheads aimed at it directly sixty hit.

No possible explosive could be powerful enough to threaten a capital ship in small enough doses to fit into a warhead capable of slipping through point defence and actually hitting one. Proton torpedoes cheated their way around this limitation with considerable elegance; they used an exploded.  
The actual charge in every torpedo head was a stasis-locked flask of particle soup, similar to the state of the universe about two to three seconds after creation. Proton scattering, indeed.

As a handling security measure, the stasis generator around the charge was itself locked in stasis when it left the factory. If the manufacturer was at all reputable.

The yield of a warhead had only a loose relationship with the physical size, but a linear relationship with the cost. The reactor chambers to compress down the particle soup in the first place and the stasis gear to handle it safely were damned expensive.

Actual yields could vary by budget, but the Imperial Starfleet concentrated on four points. Service Standard A, single to double digit megaton, small craft like assault transports up to light corvette and agile enough to be some use against heavy fighters and bombers. Service standard B, multi-hundred megaton, equivalent to a pure antiship LTL, good for killing medium and heavy corvettes. Service standard C was usually referred to as 'make your will before breathing too hard', multi- gigaton light MTL equivalent, a frigate killer. In sufficient numbers.  
Service Standard D was usually not issued to bomber pilots at all, but reserved for assault transports and special operations forces- they were often referred to as heavy rockets, reached single digit teraton yields, and employed for the likes of wing and group scale attacks on enemy destroyers and larger.

What was going in against the rebel medium corvette and light frigate equivalent carrier were standard C and D torpedoes. About four hundred of them.

Lennart had drained down the squadron's ordnance bunkers and violated half the safety regs in the book, issuing the big ship-killers to half trained bomber pilots who had barely even read up on such things and attack fighter pilots who had never flown with that kind of load.

He seemed to be getting away with it this far.

By the book, two squadrons of /Sa Bomber loaded with standard B would be enough, stand off and ripple fire them at the prison-ship corvette, a near three hundred round rollback that should saturate the defences and put enough through to literally peel off the outer surface, and even if there was no outright kill render the thing hopelessly vulnerable to bombing and strafing.

The sixty heavy heads that actually hit rendered that phase of the operation moot. It was pointless to bomb and boringly easy to strafe an expanding cloud of vapour.

The rebel carrier took over two hundred. It was physically much larger, and the rebels hadn't taken off the cargo; as the hits and the heat pounded in, the mounds of ingots in the freighter's belly absorbed much of it; mitigating factors.

The end result was, that for a few seconds anyway, there were large enough blobs of molten wreckage to show on a targeting scope.

Around the lamed, at-bay Admonisher, the five battered Imperial destroyers and their escorts formed a firing line.

'Ol, recall all transports and shuttles to their parent craft, tell them to load up with assault troops. Signals, record for transmission; "All ships with ion cannon, form into a tactical division with Fist - Tevar, lead that lot clear and organise them. Squadron general instruction; I want that ship. Sandpaper her shields down and eliminate point defence, but avoid major structural damage.  
'Vessels will take component shots only as directed by the Flag." ' Lennart thought about the order - the point of recording for transmission, to let him edit the order if it was inappropriate. Seemed good.  
'Right, transmit that - and block all outgoing signals from or authorised by the Imperial suite. Cut Kor Alric out of the loop, on my authority.'

It was only to be expected that Com/Scan, of all departments, would be well up on the ship's ambient rumours. As plumbers by appointment to the scuttle-butt, they played the major role in rumour control, and rumour creation from time to time.  
They knew roughly what was up, knew that Adannan had made nothing but enemies, and while they may have boggled at their commander's boldness in issuing that order, they obeyed it. Only just in time. There was an outgoing signal burst, channelled to Lennart's flatscreen; one of the disadvantages of holos is that everyone in the room - on the bridge - can see them. Signals thought he might want to keep this one to himself, and they were right.

It was an order absolute, a decree of the privy council, no less, by the hand of their special agent here present; the traitorous Admonisher was to be obliterated, nothing to remain, and no further action was to be taken against any target until additional Imperial units arrived.

The message included a demand for them to come at once - and Lennart himself was to report instantly to the Imperial Suite.

This is it, he thought, the political payoff, the personal battle on top of the official. Why the kriff didn't I let Admonisher blow the bridge tower off? Well, there's always plan C.

'Remember that possibility we discussed?' Lennart said, almost conversationally, to the command team. As an order he added 'Evacuate and lock down the upper bridge tower, seal all hatches, let's try to keep our resident maniac in check until the purely naval side is done. And give me shipwide PA.'

Once that was rigged, he said to the crew, without preamble, 'You recall that I said this operation was going to get unpleasantly political; it has. As an operation of war, you have justified my every confidence, but we have the last lightyear still to go, so no mistakes, not now.  
'You are probably aware that Kor Alric has not exactly shown himself to be a paragon of leadership; it goes further than that. I have evidence from the horse's mouth that he plans to turn renegade.'

Adannan and his retinue were trying to break out of the suddenly closed down Imperial suite; they could hear all of this, and if the fury of the dark side alone would have worked, he could have melted out the door and all the way down through the reactor vessel.

'Not rebel,' Lennart continued, 'simply intending to abuse the result of this operation for his own personal gain, and to what I reckon will be the detriment of the Empire. And no, I'm not gloriously happy to have to call him out on it, but it beats the alternative.  
'You know what you're capable of; most of you, I'd prefer if you didn't put yourselves at risk by getting personally involved in this, but some of you, you know who you are, I will need your help.'


	42. Chapter 42

As the squadron manoeuvred to form a firing line and the ion cannon ships turned briefly away to form up, Lennart could almost feel the mood change - on Admonisher.  
No, he could, it was just that he shouldn't be able to - but their decision processes seemed to shift from trying to fight their way clear, and engage targets chosen for them by that, to doing as much damage to the Imperial ships as possible.

As Dynamic jumped in, she was met by a ripple of half broadsides before the viewscreens had cleared, started to evade in a clumsy lurch - it looked as if one of the main engines was in local control - not well enough.

The red bolt clusters converged quickly on target, ripped into the already battered destroyer's bow and starboard side, tearing compartments open, knocking out one hyperdrive node , both starboard secondary engines, and ripping open a set of fuel cells - and drawing a phased, timed return shot that blasted Admonisher's portside forward group of turrets wide open. They exploded and kicked the heavy destroyer down and to its starboard, turning it broadside on to Dynamic.

Dordd declined to take advantage of the opportunity, instead turning and accelerating away as best he could, inflicting further damage on his ship as shot up compensator nodes failed and the already-damaged structure they were supposed to support was crushed.

Better than hanging around waiting for it to be done for them by turbolaser fire.

Dynamic was allowed to accelerate clear, and Admonisher, the bear - the shark - at bay, declined to pursue - not as if she actually could, but her fire could follow the light destroyer; chose not to, turned away from the burning Dynamic towards Fist.

Tevar made the same mistake, if it could be called that - by doctrine, she was right. By pragmatic consideration, she was taking a hazard that could not possibly be worth it. She curved back to bring Admonisher into her alpha arc, head on and bows down; opened fire.

Admonisher was slow to roll back on target, and limping from the loss of one more battery group, but her tired gun crews could still come up to the mark; they put a line of battery salvos along Fist's line of flight.

The Imperial destroyer scored first, but on sequential fire; damage the areas where the shield had been peeled back, certainly, but not the still functioning, still shielded compartments; hits there would ablate and abrade, but they wouldn't stop the big renegade firing on her, not fast enough.

One group from Admonisher's third sequence of fire hit the bridge tower. Already pounded, it was largely empty, but there was still one main long range scan dome there. At tactical combat range the "big ear"'s secondary function was to analyse and deconstruct enemy EW; they couldn't afford to lose it. The dome disintegrated, then the salvo gutted Fist's bridge module, flaring out forward and aft blasting away all the soft tissue and leaving only part of the hard outer walls and sparring of the module.

'Emergency dive,' Tevar snapped; put the bow down, change from the plan view exposing her turrets to a narrow stern-on tangent, on the theory that Admonisher would expect Fist to be ballistic now and make a prediction based on that.

She was right that time; the wreckage of the bridge module tore off as Fist accelerated into the turn, ducking under the full converged sheaf that Admonisher lobbed - the renegade's fire caught the wreckage of the bridge tower and evaporated it, but missed the main hull.

Lennart weighed up the possibilities of doing the same. On one hand, evidence - but did that really matter now, wasn't it time to just blow them up and let forensics do what they could?

It would make the fight a lot easier if Admonisher was decapitated, would save Imperial lives - and an effective end of the fight before the actual end would suit his political purposes too.  
Admonisher couldn't evade everyone at once; what would have been a difficult and unlikely shot earlier was now just about possible.

There was no good reason not to, and besides, Admonisher had realised that Fist was being conned from a position in her main hull, and was making a determined effort to finish her off. Tevar was likely to give them more chances than they deserved.

What she had left to prove, Lennart didn't know; after catching and killing Reiver, not much, he would have said, but there were a whole complex of reasons in there. Sector fleet seeking to redeem itself, sector aristocracy seeking to assert itself, and a woman.

Was there any real difference, Lennart wondered, between a misogynistic, xenophobic organisation and an organisation full of misogynistic xenophobes?  
For the tactics of survival within the organisation, for change and reform, a lot - but from the viewpoint of the individual on the receiving end, not much.

That and personal pride, which might be the deadliest component of the lot. Fist should be running clear, and he should be trying to distract Admonisher. Distract like a sledgehammer to the forehead. 'Guns, group up converged sheaf, point target, bridge module. Roll to present the starboard side immediately after. On my mark-'

He waited for the roll, was interrupted by a pit technician, 'Containment breach in the bridge tower; they're out.'

Deal with that in a moment. 'Shoot.'

The six remaining octuples and the three heavy axials crashed out together, at the same moment give or take five milliseconds that Admonisher also lobbed a full converged sheaf, from her remaining turrets, at Fist's predicted turning arc.

They expected Fist to avoid pivoting in place, to continue to accelerate and attempt to turn to bear, prolonging the move into a wide sweeping bank, and they were right. Admonisher was no longer firing ninety-six gun full salvos; she had been reduced to seventy-two, which made it slightly more survivable.

A full almost seven petaton salvo from a Shockwave was perfectly capable of pushing enough energy through the shields of a light destroyer to burn through from one end of the ship to the other, but with two turret complexes blown apart, the big ship could only manage five, and Imperators were substantially better shielded and a lot tougher on the inside.

Which helped, a little. The full set of bolts crashed into the skid-turning Imperial destroyer over Fist's portside turret line, shearing through and angling in towards the initial acceleration grid of the port main ion engine.

There was a scintillation of colour - the white flare of shield interaction and the green wash of bursting tracer wave, the fiery incendiarism of vapourising durasteel, a violet-white flare of a rupturing capacitor and the thin, electric blue wash of a rupturing engine spewing ionizates - a symphony of luminous horror.

Between the impact and the loss of an engine, Fist tumbled out of control; at least there was still something left - still mostly there, gaping, molten hole in the hull, the port aft vertex hanging on and who knew how, but not destroyed. Maimed, but not destroyed.

Admonisher's command crew had less than a heartbeat to appreciate their efforts, because Black Prince managed to land her own full time on target salvo. The shields and the front of the bridge module under them seemed to melt and ripple as the thirty-twos hit, and the three huge axial cannon finished it by tearing the command tower apart.

'Brenn, take over. You know what I want done,' Lennart said, and turned and bolted for his day cabin before the navigator could put two and two together.

Crap, Brenn thought, but didn't have time to do more than that, to wonder what Lennart was playing at. Two decisions to be made - where were the fighters to go?  
Clear the area around the deepest hole in Admonisher's hull specifically. Two ships of the squadron severely damaged - who to send to render assistance?

'Com-scan, record for transmission; "Ion division commence fire; all ships, once the target shields are fully depleted main guns stand down, LTL aim for enemy point defence. Fighter elements, same target category, clear the skin around their dorsal midships battery cluster.  
'Comarre Meridian, proceed to assist Fist, Guillemot proceed to assist Dynamic. All ships, as your shuttles and transports return, load them with boarding troops, send them out to join the attack stream, reporting to Air Commodore Olleyri." Right, send all that lot and-'

The door hissed open again and Lennart came out from his day cabin, looking worried - he had thrown some water over his face, and collected his lightsabre.

'Ah. Skipper, you-' That explained a lot, and Brenn had been about to ask 'are you sure about this?' Looking at Lennart's face, the answer was obviously no. On the other hand, what else was there to do? '-Need a hand?' Brenn actually said.

'I'm leaving the professional side of this to you to finish off, and your taking that load off my mind is help, believe me,' Lennart said.

'And thanks, but I have to do this, deal with Kor Alric in person, and somebody has to do that,' he waved at the tactical map, 'you're the best candidate. Cover my back by making sure nothing goes wrong here, yes?'

Mixed feelings; on one hand - and the rRasfenoni had five - Brenn could think of many things to go wrong, one of them being the presence of said aliens.

He didn't particularly want more command time, especially not unofficial command time as it was likely this would be. Taking the conn in the middle of a squadron scale operation, while the captain went off to do something exceptionally shady, was not Brenn's idea of a worthwhile way to spend an afternoon.  
Then again, what could he actually do? Refuse? That would let Adannan run wild - not an option. Who else could be left in charge? There were several of his own juniors and probably either Gunnery or com-Scan department heads who could be handed the job - but that would be just cowardice to leave it to them.

'You can count on me,' Brenn actually said.

'I know,' Lennart said, 'and thank you again for that, too.' He left the bridge, the blast door slamming shut and shimmering slightly as the tensors and internal ray shields locked it in place.

He had carefully not raised the possibility in Brenn's mind that Adannan might be heading for the command bridge. Possible - more than probable - but he hoped to lure the dark Jedi away. There were two contradictory logics at work; the bridge was Lennart's sanctum, his place of power - so in theory, it would make good emotional sense to face Adannan on his own command deck.  
On the other hand, it was full of people and systems he didn't want damaged in the crossfire. Also, and I really am thinking magically now, he chided himself, he didn't want them to see him like this, deliberately reaching for the Force.

That was possibly a suicidally bad decision, he might need to draw strength from them, but he was hoping the Force was sufficiently nonlocal that he didn't need to put them directly in the firing line to achieve that.

Now all I need to do, he thought, is think of some way to avoid putting me in the firing line… No chance. The politics didn't work.

'If Kor Alric turns up, don't let him in, tell him I've gone down to Engineering,' Lennart advised the stormtrooper detachment on watch. Even on Black Prince's pie-plate dropships there wasn't enough room for them all; there would be details left behind. This was one of them, eight troopers and a squad leader, E-11s, two flamers, a squad automatic and a riot gun.

'Sir, what is Kor Alric's precise legal status?' the squad leader asked, slowly and carefully.

'Good question.' Lennart replied. Tempting - useful - as it would be to be definite, it wasn't what the evidence said.  
'I don't know, exactly,' he admitted. 'I think he's violated the terms of reference of his position, and needs to be arrested pending investigation at the very least. I know I can convict him of treason, but I don't expect it to reach a courtroom. I think things are going to get resolved in a more…visceral manner. What do you think?' he put the sargeant on the spot.

'Sir?' That was a very this-is-an-officer-problem kind of 'sir.' Get your finger out of your arse and tell me what needs doing, Sir.

'I mean it. In a way, you're what this is all about. The imperatives, the bone-marrow deep loyalty. What do they say- where does service to the Empire lie?' Lennart asked slowly, spelling it out as he went.

'Captain, the dangerous cults act-' the stormtrooper sargeant temporised.

'Which Kor Alric attempted to misuse to force me to cooperate with his scheme. I'll have to answer to that sooner or later, but to an honest judge, not to him,' Lennart said, dreading the idea.

'After what you've heard, Sargeant- NL1084, is he still the legitimate authority? Do you feel still bound to obey an order that he gives you?'

There was a long pause, longer than Lennart could afford, and a hissing and crackling at the limit of audibility - intertrooper comms. 'Sir,' the sargeant said eventually, in flat, baffled tones, 'the chain of command has declined to offer a position.'

'You know, a man can look surprised even in a full face helmet. How far up the chain of command did you go?'

'To the contact code for Kor Alric's offices on Coruscant, sir.' NL1084 answered.

Lennart took a couple of seconds to think that through. They, Adannan's colleagues in that particular labyrinth of night, had hung him out to dry. If he could take Kor Alric down - if the dark Jedi wasn't strong enough to pull off his own scam, then the hell with him.  
Behind that attitude lurked something genuinely twisted, but there was a later to spend worrying about that. Or hopefully there would be. 'So do what I ask of you, then, and stand ready here,' he ordered, and headed for the lift.

'Gethrim?' he called the chief engineer on his personal com. 'Final moves. Any idea what their plan is?'

'Fan out. Give each of the minions a letter of authority, try to get them to a live com terminal, an escape pod, somewhere where they can get in touch with the rest of sector and region - rest of the Empire for that matter - to get help to use against you.'

There was also a muttered grumble about just because he was running the com tap, people coming to him for info.

'To serve his goals, maybe. Me, I think he intends to take out along the way. I hope he does; I hope I have managed to make him mad enough to fixate on me and leave most of the rest of the crew out of it. If he's any good as a Forcemonkey, he can sense me and pursue; I'll lead him away,' Lennart said.

'There's only one problem with that plan. You're a dreck swordsman,' Mirannon pointed out, bluntly. 'There. I've fed their biometrics into the system with an exclusion order. Locked them out, they can override locally, but they'll need to repeat the command at every hatch they come to. Slows them down and tracks them for an intercept.'

'Nicely done, but I was actually thinking of your other talents as a homicidal maniac,' Lennart said.

"You do realise disembowelling people is just a hobby?" Mirannon started to say, then realised just how much like the crazed dark Jedi that sounded. He changed it to 'You know, after this I may take up a less active pastime. Spanner arranging, maybe.'

'I know. After. Where are they now?' Lennart asked.

'Mostly stumbling around the bridge tower. Two, no, three already made it into the main hull, his personal pilot, his PR flack and the slab of meat.'

'Right. Not a problem. I know who I can get to deal with them - although I may need some backup to deal with Adannan personally,' Lennart said, perfectly matter of fact.

'I was wondering when you were going to work that out,' Mirannon said.

'I was just hoping you would realise it's too damn dangerous to mention the possibility until it's too late for Adannan to work it out for himself,' Lennart said. 'He has a huge blind spot where it comes to non Force users - I hope; best not to give him ideas.'

'Ah. Right,' Mirannon said blankly. Should have bloody known the skipper was going to be ahead of the situation.

'I'm going to need some of your fu- men. Voulnteers only of course, this is going to get messy, likely to be a lot of fallout.'

'If you're just planning to nuke him, I can easily manage that; give me a minute to run up a pellet and laser-trigger,' the engineer joked. Actually, there was an idea he could use in there somewhere.

'Not that it isn't tempting, but a little bit of gamma's an occupational hazard, especially for engineering; it's the legal fallout I'm actually worried about,' Lennart said.

'So I should warn them they're in for a fate worse than death?' Mirannon bounced back.

'Afraid so. If anyone's mad enough to volunteer, send them to DC Dorsal-140.'

The first intercept was no real surprise. One of the blips had entered a main vertical turbolift shaft, and was heading at high speed to Main Machinery-1.  
What other way was there to get around a ship even the size of a destroyer, quickly enough to matter? The crowded, deliberately awkward internal structure didn't help - for structural strength and to resist blast and flash, the structure was full of corners, baffles and blast doors, offset corridors, subdivided spaces. It was at least as bad as an urban area to get around, realistically ten minutes from end to end in uniform, more depending on what was being carried. Battles could be won and lost in that time - several already had today.

When there was no shooting going on, sometimes the easiest way to get from one extremity of the ship to another was actually to go EVA, but not now.

Turbolifts were on the face of it an absurdly dangerous and failure prone solution to the problem, but there was no real practical alternative. Well, not short of issuing everybody their own individual jetpack and rearranging the internal companionways for personal flight. That could be made to work on paper, and Mirannon would liked to have seen it tried at least once, although preferably on someone else's ship.

Login and over-ride, redirect the capsule to the maintenance yard adjacent to Main Machinery-1. Why walk further than necessary? The big engineer made the rest of his dispositions, then strolled off to meet a man in a lift.

Incriminating himself by doing so, but what the hell. He guessed, and rightly, who Adannan would send. The yard was closed off by a blast door, running hot - somebody was trying to melt their way through from the other side using a lightsabre. That was possible on cheap separatist ships, not on Starfleet spec. Plug in, set a momentary softening in the tensors securing the door, then a two second delay to open.

As he had expected, the lightsabre sank in as the forcefield relaxed, then wedged stuck as the field came back to full strength and hardened the metal around it again. As the door slid open, the goon on the other side didn't have the sense to switch his blade off and had it torn out of his hand.

It was who Mirannon had been expecting: the heavyweight, Banaar. Man of the bans, the boundaries; borderer and half- outsider, a natural for becoming twisted embittered and hostile. He glared at Mirannon for a second, then popped two long vibroblades out of springloaded forearm sheaths, snapping into his hands and activating, and he decided to join the scream and leap school of combat.

Split second to make a decision; was he needed alive, for any purpose? For interrogation, information, evidence? On the face of it, no; although it would be as well to err on the side of caution, it being notoriously difficult to unkill people.

Mirannon stepped into the attack, left arm snapping out in an up and out block across Banaar's right wrist to stop that blade and give time, at the same time drawing his plasma torch blade and firing it up - the thug might be fast, but he was a grudging, grumpy, negative personality. So many qualities, so many dependent factors. Temperament, preparation, mental discipline. The big engineer wasn't a hardened killer, but he was a better man. His blow landed first.

The plasma torch took the dark minion in a perfect stop-thrust just below the ribcage. Which would probably have been enough, but then Mirannon chose to exploit the properties of a containment-forcefield torch that was a tool more than it was a weapon, and fanned out the blade. All the way.

What had been a hundred and thirty centimetre long elliptical sectioned cone deformed into a flat-headed mushroom of power and light, twelve centimetre stalk, eighty centimetre diameter disk. That sliced Banaar's torso in half, destroying him structurally, no last dying moves. He looked astonished for a second, expression on a head on a half-severed neck bobbling above a filleted, cauterised body; then the corpse squelched to the ground, most of the clots bursting open.

As a hobby, against friends and colleagues, fence, prod, probe, be flashy and experimental, have fun. Against subhuman slime like Adannan's hired brute, the instant killing stroke was better than he deserved.

'Medical?' Mirannon normalised and powered down the blade, called the med complex dispatch desk. 'Cleanup crew to turbolift maintenance, bring the heavy gurney and a freezer bag in case we need to mine his head later.'

No answer. 'Medical? Hello?'

'Sorry, Chief, we have a situation here. The twi'lek-'

By then, Mirannon was already off and running.

The one of Kor Alric's minions who was absolutely sure this wasn't going to work was Laurentia. She was painfully aware that there was no real hope of accomplishing the task she had been set, which was to go to the Legion, turn them back to the side of officialdom and reassert the Special Agent's claim on their loyalties.  
She didn't think the job had a snowball's chance in hell, and was wondering bitterly what would get her first, the legion, the crew or the ship's own environmental systems, when suddenly there were people, stormtroopers, in the corridor ahead. It was going to be the worst case scenario after all.

She had been trying to pick a reasonably empty route, away from the working spaces of the ship and from where damage control would be busy. Try to get as far as possible on her forlorn hope - which it had been all along, hadn't it? Ever since Kor Alric had plucked her out of the depot unit where she had been perfectly content serving as a specialist-7 trainer in civil policing and civilian interaction. He had essentially abducted her to serve as his personal assistant, public relations agent, and whatever other darker and sicker things occurred to him.

What he had mentioned as a possibility to Lennart, he had already done to her twice, keeping her head alive on life support while he took here apart and put her back together again, while she was conscious and watching. Strangely, the actual cutting wasn't nearly as bad as the running commentary he had kept up.

And other, lesser indignities and degradations, and occasional opportunities for her to do the same. So it had gone, Kor Alric cultivating both sides of a love-hate relationship, steering her towards a state of dependency where there was nothing in the universe she hated and feared more than him, but could not exist without his attention and approval.

He had made a psychological wreck of her, and whatever independent intelligence she still had left agreed with Lennart; he had made them all less. Part of her duty in particular was to make more of herself, she had to try to repair the damage he did to her, stay strong and capable, ready, adaptable and willing to serve.

And how he had enjoyed playing on that. Still, the imperatives remained. If this was the hand she had been dealt there was nothing to do but play it out, suffer, endure and grab at every bittersweet moment; learn to endure, if not exactly enjoy, the pain.

Intellectually she knew she was one of many, but her kin were spread few and far between. Aleph-3, the absurd one with no personal name who had spent her life in the field, had fallen in love, or convinced herself that she had, with her commanding officer.  
Who, to be fair, was a competent man who treated her as a professional and respected her skills, and wanted her to be her own person - against her own wishes on the subject?

Ah, there may be an opening there, Laurentia thought, and hated herself for still wanting to try.

It was Omega-17-Blue who were barring her way now, had intercepted her on the upper barracks deck four levels above the staging area for the dropships. Caught before she could get a chance to deliver the message.

Laurentia was relieved but not surprised when her sister took off her helmet and hooked it to her belt. Tactically it would have been netter for them to just shoot her, but there was a lot of unfinished business.

'Are we really so dissimilar? We share the same fatal flaw,' Laurentia said as an opening gambit. 'Loyalty to our men.'

'In your case, I would call that a death wis,.' Aleph-3 shot back. 'You're probably not aware, but you have a nervous twitch; every time I mention him, you jump as if someone stood on your tail. Why do you follow him?' It was an impossible question, one that momentarily took Laurentia aback as she tried to work out how her sister could ask that.

'You shouldn't need to ask that. It's built in to all of us, unyielding loyalty, faithfulness to authority no matter what-'

'Except that it isn't,' Aleph-3 said flatly. 'There is nothing, nothing in the hindbrain that condemns us to a life of service without meaning, without intelligent anticipation, without excellence. We do not have to be used the way you have been used - how could you let that happen to you?'

And in asking that, Laurentia realised, she also asks, how can I? The situation starting to get to you a little, dear sister? 'So you are content to be a slave, just so long as you aren't an obscure one? Have you ever been a harem pet, or do you just want to be?'

Laurentia was aware that she was attacking from a position of weakness. What would constitute a position of strength? Harsh reality against fluffy imagination, Pain against Dreams? Inherently extremely depressing - but if that was what was most likely to work, it was what she would have to do.

'We came out of the same mould,' the actually younger Aleph-3 admitted, 'but I'm not your mirror. Why are you asking me these things that you should have asked yourself, and got answers to, long ago?' Which was a question that could be pointed both ways. They were clones; what was obvious to one as obvious to the other - and they were both accusing each other of being fundamentally flawed, of missing the obvious.

'You're afraid,' Aleph-3 went on. 'Afraid of being a clone, willing to do anything, descend to being a prostitute and a sadist's torture doll, to grasp at an identity of your own.'

Water off a sugar cube's back. It was so true, so painfully and directly true that it made little difference. So many of the rank and file - and the live born enlistees more than most - fit that description, eagerly embracing anonymity - but not their line. Their batch was supposed to be identifiable, distinct - and yet identify with the many. It was as much a fact of Laurentia's existence as breathing oxygen, so true that it actually had no tactical significance, being effectively unchangeable. So why had her sister chosen to say that?

'You? Sniper-scout, seeing without being seen, undercover operative; how many identities, how many masks, how many ways to avoid having to say 'I am me, I am here, it is now?'' Laurentia counter-accused.

Aleph-3 opened her mouth to retort, then remembered Lennart had said much the same thing. Instead she snapped, 'If that means accepting what identity means for you, then damn right. I am a hunter, a shadow, I've tracked down dozens of enemies of the Empire - and you belong to one. You've let yourself be used, tortured, three quarters destroyed - if that is what it means to be and to belong, then I want no part of it.'

'And you think you would have been able to do any differently in my place - you think you would have been given a choice?' Laurentia snarled at her sister.

'You're fooling yourself - followed a trail right off into dreamland. Reality hurts. You don't have choices, you don't have options, I was hurt and how are you try to use that against me.'

'Hurt? You were played,' Aleph-3 bit back. 'You're a doll owned by a monster, the only thing you have to be proud of is your suffering, and that is nothing worthy of celebration.' Why am I saying this? Aleph-3 wondered. What is actually my objective here? Killing my sister would be trivially easy. The rest of the squad aside, he took her apart and put her back together too many times.  
She's not as strong or as fast as she ought to be, her skills have too much gloss polish and not enough cutting edge, although as mad as she has every right to be she shouldn't hesitate to hurt me. Although what is this standing and talking, if not hesitation?

The thought crystallised; I want to save her. From Kor Alric, and from herself. Although she knows how to place her barbs, I don't think I can save her from me as well if she keeps trying to goad me. Two out of three is the best I can manage.

'You, you number. You're nobody's; that man you think is yours,' Laurentia screamed at her sister, 'he doesn't want you, he can't tell who you really are - doesn't know how many of you he's going to have to put up with.'

That went to the bone, Aleph-3 had to admit. Largely because she was terribly afraid that it was true. Did Jorian Lennart need her? As he was at the moment - no. Honestly, no.  
As he grew into the Force - but a moment; was what she wanted to turn him into likely to treat her any more considerately than Kor Alric did Laurentia?

The dark Jedi's pet saw her sister's flicker of doubt.

'Join us. It really is that simple. Come with me, do your duty. Your connection doesn't make sense and can't bear fruit, only misery - and that's not what you're for.'

That was so absurd, even in her confused and blackened mood Aleph-3 noticed it. 'I don't believe this,' she said. 'That you, victim as you are, still have the nerve to talk about purpose-'

'Audacity was never something our line was short of, sister,' Laurentia said. 'Consider this, we were designed and raised by a bunch of isolate xenomorphs, who had the personal contact of two males from freakishly repressed cultures. A mando so gynophobic that a clone son was the only way he was ever going to reproduce, and a dried out old fart of a Jedi- and past that only the textbooks to go on. You think it's remotely possible that they actually got human sexuality right? You really think we're normal?'

Aleph-3 paused for a moment, remembering dealing with clone troopers whose sexuality had been so confused they had hit puberty in their late twenties, and how it had felt to be the only woman in the barrack block when they did. That in itself had been a good incentive to throw herself into the role of sniper-scout, away from the main body of the regiment.  
It had made a difference at the time, too; so many of the clones had been, effectively, eunuchs, and most Jedi generals had all the empathy and concern for their men of a halfbrick, and tended to target-fixate.

A lot of the clonetroopers had got themselves killed because they, literally as well as metaphorically, did not have the balls to stand up to the oblivious dedication of their leaders and point out that there was often an easier and less wasteful way. The lack of hormonal activity reinforced the sense that they were just meat, not living beings with a life cycle and an identity that might be worth preserving. How the live born recruits to the stormtrooper corps were coerced into the same mental state was an interesting and painful tale.

'There are billions of different takes on what it means to be normal, and most of them contradictory. I'm sure I can pass for several,' Aleph-3 said, and regretted it immediately.

'I'm sure you can, but only one of them matters; are you comfortable in your own skin? Are you doing what makes you happy?' Laurentia asked, pointedly.

'Considering how often you end up out of your skin, that's not a metaphor I'd have used,' Aleph-3 snapped back. Damn her, she thought, she's a version of me, she knows me too well and she's already hit rock bottom, there's nothing more I can do about that except maybe make her cry, and that takes us nowhere.

'Squashing your libido out of shape and putting on a mask are not what I mean, and you know it. Who are you when you're not pretending? Who's the face behind the mask?' Laurentia said.

'Don't be daft, I'm me,' Aleph-3 said, weakly.

'And who- what- is that? Is there anything that you would sell your soul for the chance to do, or refuse even if your life depended on it? Professionally, we're ambisexual; man, woman, alien, machine, animal, no difference. Where does the pretence and the facility, where does the ooze end and the hard edge of 'no' begin?  
'You don't know, do you? You're just as much a pet, a pawn and a victim as I am, you've never been given sufficient opportunity to prove it,' Laurentia snarled. Perhaps this was going to be easier than she had thought.

'Now that is something I can recognise in myself,' Aleph-3 said. 'Pride in being one of the boys, as well as one of the girls. That feels familiar - and I know who I am, even if I can't explain it.' Or daren't, a little voice in the back of her head said. 'At any rate, better uncertain than condemned.'

'The one thing you have to be,' Laurentia charged, waving away what she considered to be Aleph-3's hollow protest, 'loyal to the cause of the Empire. Faithful unto death, faithful beyond reason, wasn't that the old joke?'

'That was one we told against ourselves,' Laurentia went on, 'we knew ourselves that well, but we still stood to the colours and fought and died in the same old way. Nothing changed, the loyalty's bred in the bone. You don't know your man as well as you think you do, and you're not really bound to him. He's a renegade, which in itself may be charming, but it's wrong and you know it. He's not the power here, he's a mid ranking line officer, Kor Alric stands far higher in the trust of the emperor we serve, and that is the imperative, that is what we have to obey.'

Aleph-3 could feel the rest of the team behind her thinking about it. Theoretically, Laurentia had a point.

'He stands condemned as a traitor, caught plotting against the Empire. If you're determined to stand by him, if his claws are in you that deeply, then my main imperative is to shoot you as an accessory to treason. Something you, personally, have only made easier,' Aleph-3 admitted.

'Not by anyone who had the authority to do so,' Laurentia stated. 'Captain Lennart's too junior - and already in violation of regs himself in failing to obey a senior official of the Empire.'

'Are you entirely serious?' The squad - and actually senior officer of the entire recon/hunter element, Aleph-One, asked Laurentia. 'Your interpretation is that a senior officer's authority automatically protects him against charges resulting from the misuse of that authority?  
'A junior officer has no right to question? Regulations, law, common sense, none of it important? I would have to ask my commanding officer's permission to report him for treason, and would be unable to do so if he ordered me not to?'

Of course,' Laurentia said, without a trace of irony. 'The powerful - wield power. That is how it is. How could the Empire function if every Ploovo, Gort and Rikki could interfere at any moment?'

'That's completely crazy,' Aleph-One said, not entirely believing. 'I've been a scout all my career, and most of that spent in disagreement - different eye view, different idea of what was going on and what needed to be done from my line of command. If things worked the way you think they do I would have been dead years ago - if common sense and power went hand in hand, fine, but they don't, not in the human race and no species we know of is that alien.  
'There has to be some measure of respect for the abilities and willingness to serve of the lower status, some measure of reciprocity here.'

'Captain, I don't believe you're a dishonest or treacherous man by nature,' Laurentia said, with a twisted grin, 'so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that, if I were to play back to you in a couple of days' time what you've just said, you'd be as horrified as I am by the proto-Rebellion propaganda you've just reeled off.'

'We have no rights, only duties?' Aleph-3 shook herself together, and said, 'Dewback-shit. We have the right of expecting the other parts of the Imperial order to live up to their mandate and do their jobs.'

'Oh, and, as far as having sufficient rank goes,' she continued, 'you are aware of what just got broadcast over the PA? Your man condemning himself, from his own mouth. I have his own word for it, and apparently he's of sufficient rank that I have to take him seriously when he incriminates himself.'

'Nonsense,' Laurentia, for effect, giggled. 'He can order you to believe that he's loyal, and follow him. His word against - his word? You'll obey the formal order - you have to. You will fall into line.'

'And if I think the higher duty is to protect the Empire from him?' Aleph-One said, again.

'You can't. It is the law, it simply isn't up to you to decide how good a servant of the Empire he is, it doesn't work that way round,' Laurentia said, and actually the rulebook was on her side. 'Now are you going to join the ranks of the deviant and try to stop me, or follow while I go to talk to the legion commander?'

'If it's word against word, rank against rank - he's not here.' Aleph-3 said. 'You are. And I believe the Captain and myself both rank you, Specialist.'

Lauentia looked over the team. Twelve of the elite of the stormtrooper corps - and the rules were clear. Even if she killed one, she could order the rest to fall into line, and they would have to do so. Captain OB171, Warrant Officer OB173, who else? Who was of sufficient rank - just the squad leader and her sister?

Laurentia flexed her left hand - the telescoping finger-claws shot forward, fused into place, and she drew her master's gift and activated it with the other hand. Vibro-claw and lightsabre.

She darted towards her sister, claw ready to parry high, lightsabre sweeping up from low, hopefully to disembowel;

Aleph-3 barely had time to draw her parrying stick, the superdense rod of exotic Phrik that could withstand, briefly, a lightsabre, and move it up, round and out, pushing the sabre down and away from the high guard position.

The claw came down and tried to slash her sister's right arm, Aleph-3 managed to lean back into it and avoid it ripping her head off, but she had a split second before her sister managed to manoeuvre the sabre free - Aleph-3 headbutted Laurentia.  
Burst her nose, made her stagger briefly, lost a hank of hair and was stunned by one of the vibroclaw fingers flickering along the side of her head, but Aleph-3 recovered fast, adrenalin taking over.

Twisted out of the way of the sabre which went high and wide, managed to recover, switched her parrying rod from hand to hand, didn't have time to think about her other hand as Laurentia came back at her.

Aleph-3 tried to get past the sabre and grab Laurentia's sword hand, the sabre flickered back to cut her arm off, Aleph-3 blocked it with the rod and started pushing it up and away, had to jump back herself as the claw came down and raked her over the chest - the armour took that swipe, a few scores, no real damage.

The iridescent red-blue plate the squad all wore was actually the never-officially-issued Royal Guard version of the later model Clonetrooper suit; it had been designed with some pretty impressive enemies in mind- could take most carbine and pistol fire.

How long would it take for a lightsabre to burn through? Longer than a second - well, there was a chance there. Although not a good one. Might hold off a slash, briefly, not a thrust. Aleph-3 decided to feint what had worked last time - catching the lightsabre on her stick, holding it for a moment while bringing her heavy rifle up in the other hand.

Pushed out for the sabre and caught it; wondered whether or not to convert the feint into a real attack; found the grip, started swinging the gun up - as expected, her sister reacted to that, swaying back out of the high block and flashing the lightsabre round and down -  
Aleph-3 tried to drop the muzzle out of the way, didn't quite manage it, had the front end of her gun sliced off. Which was an acceptable loss, because it let her get a lunge in with the parry stick into the nerves in her sister's other armpit.

Laurentia's claw arm hung limp, the lightsabre recovered - almost of its own will, she felt, following what the weapon said to do - and slashed out flatly at Aleph-3's stomach; Aleph-3 rolled backwards and found herself against the feet of the rest of the team, and Aleph-One pushing the hilt of a vibrosabre into her hand as she stood up.

Laurentia had been about to follow up and slash at her sister as she stood, but hesitated. Partly from caution - Aleph-3 had an offensive weapon now. Partly - well, they were sisters. The same flesh and blood. It wasn't going to be easy to land the killing stroke.

In theory, loyalty alone mattered. She had thought that. Now - well, the first thing to do, they thought circling round each other, disarm. Laurentia could accomplish that easily enough by striking at - through - the vibrosabre.

Aleph-3 kept sidestepping, trying to hold the sabre back and keep the parrying stick forwards; almost succeeded in turning through one eighty, leaving Laurentia between herself and the rest of the team.

'You do realise I want you dead as well?' Aleph-One said, as Laurentia passed closest to him. And raised his own carbine.

Laurentia was shocked, taken aback; her mental horizon had contracted to focus on her sister, she had almost forgotten about him - turned to swing the lightsabre at him.

Aleph-3 saw her opportunity, darted forwards, almost colliding with her sister, reaching past her to catch the lightsabre near the hilt with the stick and flick it upwards - and sabre coming up and under, almost straight up the line of her sister's torso, impaling.

That worked, at least the first part. Laurentia looked down at the sabre pushed out of position, back at her sister almost draped over her, screamed in anger and tried to reverse the blade in her hand, cutting down on her sister's head.

Aleph-3 started to bring the sabre up, had to reach out and back to get it in position to start the move, hesitated. Was this right? It might be necessary - but what a life her sister Laurentia had had, torment and torture, and to come to an end like this, barren and brutal and lightless - for a moment, it was more than she could do to deliver the killing slash. Her own flesh and blood deserved better, deserved a second chance.

The hate in her sister's eyes burned through that, it was the duration of a blink, a surge of realisation, not long to change a life but more than long enough to end one. The lightsabre swept down-

And fortunately, Aleph-One had the presence of mind to pull the trigger.

At a slight angle to avoid overpenetrating into his senior warrant officer, who was left there in shock for a few seconds as the chestless body of Spec-7 batch 6NL strain code 554 subunit 108, "Laurentia", collapsed to the deck.

'If you had managed to get that blow in,' Aleph-One said, 'you'd be having nightmares about this for the next ten years. Couldn't let you go through that.'

'She was right,' Aleph-3 said, lost and maudlin. 'What am I not willing to do, where won't I go…Jorian knew that, that's why we were sent to meet her. I needed to do that - nightmares and all. I couldn't. I flinched.'

'Normal, human reaction,' Aleph-One said, 'which is a step up.' He retried the lightsabre from the corpse's dead fingers. 'He also knew we would be here to back you up. Come on, we've still got a shuttle to catch.'

'What do we tell the High Colonel?' Aleph-3 managed to ask, the most sensible question she could come up with instead of what she felt like saying.

'Simple. An agent of the traitor tried to give us illegitimate orders, and like the indefatigable, incorruptible servants of the Empire we are, we...did what had to be done. It is true,' Aleph-1 pointed out, 'from a certain point of view.'

The rRasfenoni had a problem: managing not to get squashed by the Imperial Starfleet. That was actually a real and distinct possibility for the 'second city' of their little polity, the one they had chosen to stage the actual fighting over, at least if Tichy misplaced his hyperspace exit and came out too close and heading straight for the planet.

Such an error was unlikely, but a deliberate attack - no, no responsible officer would squander a ship by smashing it into an immovable object like that. Mandators were simply too important to lose, and Tichy could be more subtle than that.

There were a couple of tricks that the big dreadnought could use to decelerate, but none of them were a good idea from the viewpoint of structural integrity. Grabbing something with the towing rig and using that as an anchor could be done, but only with the chance of tearing the stern off the ship. Best not.  
A second kinetic attack? Excessively predictable - once it was spotted coming, and the main reason it wasn't usually done and Tichy had ridden it almost all the way in, the impact ship would be blasted to vapour. Which in itself would still hit, but a planetary shield could soak that a lot easier than it could a solid hit.

It would take Tichy six thousand seconds to decelerate to a reasonable speed, no way to slow down much faster than that; there were a few exotic possibilities, but nothing that would work for a ship the size and structural strength of a dreadnought. In theory, something with the power to weight of a starfighter - or a very fast frigate - could juggle the transition to and from hyperspace, lose or gain momentum in the shunt; for anything with a structure rated at less than four thousand 'g', it was distinctly unwise, and to be honest, most fighters couldn't do it either. The computer systems to manage it were a step above even the standard full range nav computer and too expensive for most forces to bother issuing.

Slingshotting around something with the towing rig could work, but faced the slight problem that just because it was effective momentum transfer, it wasn't magic. The stress would be placed on the towing tractors and field generators, and anything much more than rated acceleration, they couldn't stand anyway. The object itself would probably be ripped to shreds, the impulse would be impossible, no physical object...ah.

And then, a plan was born. This could be fun.

Goshawk was dodging as well as she could, sidestepping and writhing; eventually, if only from power endurance, she would lose. The shield surfaces emitting were much less efficient than a warship's neutrino radiators, but very much larger - and the planet may be running on fusion power for the most part, but they had hundreds of square kilometres of reactor farm to work with.

Kor Alric felt two of his team die. Banaar, one of trillions like him. A thug who could be replaced anywhere in the galaxy.

Laurentia, well, she was more of a loss. More in terms of man-hours wasted, his moulding her and playing with her, now gone. Well, there was at least one ready made replacement.

The plan was coming apart around him, though. There was one chance, one last chance. He should have done this to begin with, but the personality profile had been all wrong. He couldn't cut through plates and spars protected by the ships' shields and tensor field; that was intended to if not resist at least minimise damage from multi-teraton hits. Had to work his way through the corridors, strangely deserted.

No point avoiding it, he needed to find Lennart and the bridge was the most obvious place. Although - he had gotten into the lift, instantly been frustrated by its habit of pausing at each floor and asking for a confirmation code to proceed. Obviously some kind of security lockout, so he had lightsabred his way through the floor, into the shaft, and found out that telekinetic hovering was harder than it looks. Getting back out of the shaft at bridge level was fun, too.

Hanging by one hand and trying to satisfy the biometrics - what kind of madman puts a retinal and DNA scanner on the wrong side of an elevator door? - had been complicated, and he was painfully aware of the amount of warning he would be giving to whoever was on the other side.

As the door crunked open, there was a squad there. Good. They could - their guns were pointed at him. His brain was still buzzing with potential solutions, he hadn't decided precisely what yet, so the red mist hadn't come down and he was still able to think of scanning them for intent. Surprisingly, none. Two flamers and a missile launcher loaded with something anti-personnel: it shouldn't have been hard for them to kill him, if they had received orders to do so. Which they hadn't.

'Follow me,' he said, pushing himself up out of the shaft and turning towards the command bridge door.

The stormtroopers looked at each other. The sargeant swallowed, took the plunge, 'sorry, Sir, that's beyond our remit.'

'What? Adannan snarled, infuriated. 'How dare you? Your remit is to obey.'

'Exactly, Sir. Captain Lennart said to tell you that he's heading down to Engineering.'  
Hm. So he had chosen the bowels of the ship rather than the brain for his arena, had he? No matter. And what to do about these? Anything? They were only a symptom - a symptom of him.

A cunning psychological fighter as well, it seemed, to mislead and corrupt stormtroopers out of their unthinking obedience. If anything, Adannan thought, I need him. If I can only make him see.

The barrage from the ships of the squadron slackened; all were close enough to watch each other's fire go in and know when to stop shooting to allow the ion cannons free play.  
Fewer of them than Lennart had really wanted or intended, and the majority of those relatively lightweight - the only really heavy weapons in the squadron were Fist's aft turrets. Of those, one was gone, the other - the maimed destroyer was evidently in no mood to accept help, instead demanding of Comarre Meridian - herself damaged- that instead of manoeuvring clear, they roll Fist round into firing position.

There was dedication, and there was dedication - not that Brenn was minded to try and stop her. Anything that helped put Admonisher down before someone managed to regain control and resume return fire was all right by him.

The shuttles were starting to come back, most of those left over Ord Corban microjumping in. The first to land were a group from Voracious - cleared in ahead of the other because they were carrying retrieved ejectees, including apparently Group Captain Vehrec, who was suffering from severe radiation poisoning. Bacta was supposed to be good for that, eat away damaged tissue and encourage regrowth, but at the moment that would probably mean dissolving all of him. What they would have to do to get him decontaminated, Brenn didn't really want to think about - sieve through him molecule by molecule looking for damage, probably, and hope there was enough left to regrow.

Anyway, the medical retrievals were the first to touch down; the first to leave again had an unfair advantage - the two spacetrooper platoons. They didn't have to wait for the stubby, heavy assault shuttles to dock; they could just jet on out to meet them. QAG-111 could have stopped them; in quick conference with Olleyri, decided not to. It was logical to lead in with them anyway.

The heavy assault shuttles had enough power endurance to touch and go, and no ordnance to reload, so not a problem. The only major headache was going to be traffic control around the target site - the spacetroopers might be better off going in through the ruins of the hangar bay rather than getting in the way of the fighters.

It was Aron's Hunters and Franjia's Starwings that got hauled back for precision strike work, both of them remembering - and cursing bitterly - about what she had said earlier about defence suppression work; ten percent tour survival rate. They had already lost a couple - the two Hunter squadrons were now down to sixteen craft between them, the two Starwing squadrons nineteen. Neither of them were technically senior, but everyone knew it was them who had the ball.

Shockwave class carried a relatively strange point defence fit - no LTL at all. Highly peculiar, meant that against attack boats and corvettes they had to resort to stepdown main gun fire, but relatively well adjusted for the threat of droid fighters, with a thick blanket of one hundred and sixteen half-megaton Corellian quads.

This was going to be fun. Proximity missile detonations to try to take the turrets out with flash could work, actual strafing runs - well. Best to clear out one aspect, bombard it with warheads set to detonate just off the hull, land enough energy per square metre to melt a defence turret without burning into the hull. Then, once there actually was an edge to work with, start unravelling the defences from there. Franjia's PulsarWing no longer mounted the missile guidance electronics, which was sensible enough for an individual craft, considering the thing didn't have a missile system, but not for a squadron leader who might have to designate missile targets for their unit.

Half of them were confused by what she was doing back in the cockpit at all; she had disappeared, been recaptured from a rebel ship, ended up in sickbay, released herself to light duties, went AWOL and technically stole her own fighter. Half of the pilots didn't understand why she was still allowed to fly, and the other half just wished they could get away with it too.

That and she was really still trying to get the hang of the PulsarWing. It had its flaws. With the guns drawing full load, she didn't need the instrumentation, she could feel the balance of the thing change through the seat of her pants as the reactor module ate fuel. That, and the fact that it was a reactor module, power generator, engine setup, not an integrated pod; much closer to the thing's shuttle ancestry than to the vast majority of fighters.  
The target finding and tracking system was designed to be worked by a gunner, too - Cygnus had chosen to take little or nothing from the old H-60 and TL-118, the earlier big gun fighters, which meant that while they avoided a lot of the mistakes, they also bypassed any good ideas that were going.

At least Subpro had understood that a capital weapon mounted on a fighter needed a fighter gunsight, not a full on-mount fire control system.

She really needed a gunner and a flight engineer; there was simply too much cockpit work to be done to make this a feasible option for the majority of Imperial pilots. Anyone with multi-engine time could cope, but it wasn't a multi-engine transport. It was a fighter and had to be handled with the speed of a fighter. Too many complex problems needing solved too quickly.

The stability suffered under maximum rate of fire, she swore the cockpit module actually got shorter as the engines pushed against the recoil, the ESM system was completely new and giving her more data than she wanted or could analyse - then again, partly it was her fault for even trying. Most pilots would have switched everything to automatic and hoped the computer knew what it was doing.

That and most pilots when they came in to land would have put it down, walked away and immediately requested reassignment to TIE Bombers. Understandable.

She wouldn't. Although it was definitely a challenge, the striking power more than made up for it. The sheer power of the multimegaton light turbolasers meant that she had about a tenth of a second to draw an arc with the beam, and the fire control system was designed to do that, also limited autosteer on to target. Which she had to set the parameters for. For the first and only time in her career she had lost count of her score. At first, use the advantage to its fullest, open up at range and pick off lazy rebels who thought they were too far away to need to manoeuvre, but that had quickly turned into a disadvantage given the missile volleys the rebels had enough sense to lob back at her.

Actually, the ESM system had come in pretty handy, and she now had positive proof that the PulsarWing was very well shielded. It had been a wild ride, and she was too busy dealing with the ship systems for it to sink in yet just how many of those little red dots she had put an end to.

The plan was for her to ride in slightly above and apart, use her turbolasers to pick off any of the defence mounts that looked to be too dangerous. Aron would be hotdogging it in at close quarters.

The barrage rolled in - few flashes of red point defence laser, combing the area, splashed a few of the warheads, no prematures; she rippled off three bursts of fire, missed one and killed two quads, then noticed a strange blip behind them. Coding system, officially imperial transponder, ESM gave it a high probability of fraudulence, also indicated the thing was being flown by a reduced crew. Unidentified, but probably armed yacht. Kor Alric's personal transport.

Was there anything to do? The strike was going in - most of the fighters opening up with their own ion guns, backing up the light ion cannon fire from the rest of the squadron and Fist's overdriven heavies. Point defence was suffering already, several turrets had been taken out in the main ship to ship, the first loaded assault shuttles and transports - also with ion cannon - were moving out. There was nothing immediately requiring her attention. Except maybe that transport.

Check with flight control? She believed - knew - that Kor Alric was scum, a fundamentally evil man. She was in trouble anyway, largely his fault. He had preyed on her impulses, marginalized her, nearly broken her career - and possibly with the motive of turning her into another cyborg, a replacement for his personal pilot.

There was no real possibility of committing murder without being noticed; the PulsarWing and its gun flashes were just too much of a giveaway. On the other hand, the target was unescorted.  
As well hung for a murder as a theft. She would not serve him - and forget the usual rhetoric about rather dying first; with the firepower at her fingertips, she had the opportunity to kill.

It was, on the face of it, insane, but that man had endangered her, endangered her ship and her comrades. Never mind the poor fools she had spent the day blowing up, there was the real threat. Come to think of it, it was a unique, and she was flying a prototype; she could claim electronics malfunction, might even get away with it.

Targeting passive, quick look over the official target - flowers of detonating warhead, followed by a new cluster of blips that she mistook at first for debris, realised were the spacetroopers deploying in the wake of the barrage - and swing round to bear. The sleek dart-shape was twisting and twitching, partly overworked engine management, but also partly deliberate evasion, and at least part of the flagship's attention was going on focusing jammers on it. All the proof she needed.

The Force was obviously with Myfara, because nothing else but a healthy supply of miracles could explain how she had been able to be in the right place, the flight bay, bring the Tetrarch up to readiness, get clearance and launch without being stopped. Her master had passed a codeword, the one that meant 'send for help.'

It was probably faster to jump clear and jump back than to try to make high-sublight speed to the edge of the jamming zone. That still left her trying to pick her way through the fringes of the battlefield, looking for safe space to start plotting a jump.

There was an alert beep; incoming fighter showing no aspect change, on an attack course. Myfara activated the droid driven defence turrets, cursing - needing to hold steady for the calculation.

Tetrarch was a difficult target, if not exactly cloaked, then at least wearing a long overcoat. Easier to track it by the ion flares. Then it became a lot easier than Franjia would have liked, as the defence systems gave four active fire control beams to home in on. The droid turrets were each a linked laser cannon and missile launcher, and they had no inhibitions at all about firing on other Imperial craft.

Franjia had half a second to weigh the situation - as long as it would take the droids to lock on to her PulsarWing. No sense waiting.  
Line up and shoot, two dual-purpose light turbolasers spitting out two six-megaton bolts per second each. In theory, ten seconds to burn through an unmodified Corellian Corvette, two seconds to wreck an assault transport. In practise, the personal transport of an agent of the privy council was going to be a much more resilient beast than that. Myfara had to make the choice - hope the turrets would be enough and continue to plot, or engage directly, take the intruder down and then run?

Three pairs of turbolaser bolts pounding the combat-yacht were a powerful hint. Myfara paused the calculation, started to turn as if to make it a stern chase, relying on speed-masking two of the turrets that spat out laser fire at the attack fighter, although all four spat out concussion missiles.  
Easily enough to swat light fighters away, and useful if what had been attacking her had been a light fighter. Franjia managed to blind two with the attack jamming suite, snapshot and killed one, rolled away from the fourth which detonated, proximity not contact. Shield erosion, that was all.

At least, for the time being. Tetrarch reversed roll as soon as Franjia was engaged with the missiles, looping up and over to point on from high on the port wing of the heavy fighter.

Adannan paid relatively little attention to such things, allowed his pilot to use her own judgement when it came to what sort of firepower his personal transport required. While that meant she got her own toys to play with, it also meant that he would hold her very painfully responsible for getting it wrong, so she had put a lot of thought into this.

A yacht is at a natural disadvantage in any fighter combat. Even if it can turn and burn with a first-line fighter, it is so much bigger and so much easier a target. Speed and agility are secondary defensive mechanisms at best, behind the ability to get them before they get you.

Quadrilateral again, the Tetrarch mounted four blister turrets around her nose, each housing a rapid-fire autoblaster and a long barrel area defence laser.

For all the disparity in mass and size, the PulsarWing actually had the edge in raw firepower. Not that anyone observing could have deduced that from the storm of tracer.

Franjia pushed the PulsarWing into a hard turn against her previous line of flight, breaking across the Tetrarch's nose, not enough to throw off all the turrets but certainly enough to baffle the pilot.

The transport was fast, in and of itself, but it was not a dogfighter; Myfara managed to haul the thing's nose round, following the fire pointers, when the heavy imperial fighter flashed past again going the other way, a sideways Z-turn that brought Franjia's guns back on target - she landed another four hits before Myfara could swing the bow gun clusters round to bear.

Both craft on each other's bow quarter; Myfara expected the treacherous Imperial - well, if that wasn't a contradiction - to repeat the same move, take another step in the dance; eased the nose in that direction - and naturally, Franjia did anything but, breaking and rolling outwards, level and reciprocal, pushing the engines hard to get a vector and pivoting on the thrust deflectors to strafe.

Tetrarch wasn't the Falcon, at the far end of a vicious circle of adaptation; more speed to do illegally lucrative things, that made enemies needing weaponry to fight them off, that attracted official protection needing armour plate to survive, that slowed the ship down needing more powerful engines - Tetrarch was effective, but first-order.

Tetrarch's shields flickered, fading on the edge of blowout; Myfara was slow to respond - for Adannan's followers, imminent death was not the terror it might have been. Failing him was a dreadful prospect, though.

The combat yacht tried to flip end for end, point its main guns towards the heavy fighter, but Franjia read the move again, as Tetrarch rolled over she accelerated across its bow, wrongfooting it, and leaving Myfara wondering exactly who or what she was up against.

Soon to be quite a lot. Elements of Delta and Epsilon squadrons were wondering where their squadron leader had got to; spotlighted around, waved active sensors over what she was shooting at.

It looked to the dark Jedi's personal pilot that the entire squadron was about to move on her; that settled it, no more point in fighting. Shift shields aft and turn away, firewall it, get out.

There was one factor that she missed. Franjia put the heavy PulsarWing on its edge and sideslipped outwards. Away from the sensible direction, opening the range, but also opening the angle - aiming for Tetrarch's thinly protected bow. A narrow sliver of a shot window.

Easy enough when she was able to take more than one shot.

Myfara didn't have time to comprehend what had hit her. Two six-megaton bolts hit and splashed over Tetrarch's bow, shattering the nose, burning out the electronics, and turning the flight deck into a cinder pit.

Franjia wasn't sure what she expected to happen next; ordered to stand down, at least. Blown to bits by point defence fire from Black Prince, maybe.

Actually, a simple order to rejoin the strike pattern from Olleyri. Calm, as if nothing had happened. She was on the verge of demanding his opinion and that he arrest her when she realised how daft that would be.

That, and as the front face of Black Prince's bridge module lit up, it looked as if someone else was thinking fratricide.

On board the Dynamic, the best that could be said was that there were some people still alive. Some, not everyone. C turret's internal baffles had failed - enough heat had been transferred into the gun house to incinerate everybody in there. The secondary reactor's crew were gone. Most of the port engine bay had been opened to space and gunflash. Main Battery Control was still ready, closed up with two turrets remaining, although there was nothing substantial left in the way of targets. Except maybe one.

Suluur had managed to catch up with the squadron com chatter, and listened to Adannan's self-condemnation, coolly and distantly, face a calm mask. Aldrem worried about him, but right now -  
'He was in the Imperial suite, last I heard. And, I think…get me Captain Dordd.'

The command bridge of Dynamic was a mass of red and grey, status indicators and internal display showing a ship that had been pounded within an inch of its life.

'Aldrem,' Dordd acknowleged wearily, when com-scan put them through. Kriffing smenge, you look terrible, was the first thing that occurred to Aldrem. Dordd looked as if he had aged ten years in ten minutes, and that was pretty much how he felt as well.

Dordd wasn't sure how much more he could take. He had taken a ship he had known was not ready for combat into a fast-moving running brawl against an enemy with four times the weight of fire, and although they had emerged on the winning side, he didn't feel as if he had won. 'What is it?' he asked.

Aldrem thought about cutting straight to the chase, but decided Captain Dordd might be just a touch too eager. Possibly the best thing he could personally do would be to offer himself up as a target, let the captain vent his feelings on someone who could take it more easily than a member of his permanent crew. Trying not to let it look like as bad an idea as he felt it was, he said, 'well, Sir, most of the ship's still here, by tonnage if not necessarily by function…'

Dordd refused to behave as he had been expected to. Wishing he had thought that a week earlier, before he had let loyalty con him into a state where he put his ship through this. Not that it was a good ship, not that he hadn't expected this, but it hurt. Not that he could afford to show it, now they needed him more than ever. 'Do you have nothing better to do than to try to draw some of my venom, Lieutenant?'

I should have known better, Aldrem realised. 'Actually, yes, I do. Have you had a chance to keep up with the interflotilla chatter?'

Dordd snorted in disbelief.

'Too busy, right. Can you roll the ship round,' Aldrem said, 'so I have a clear line of fire to Black Prince's bridge module?'

'I'm going to need you to explain that,' Dordd said. He genuinely had been to busy to do more than watch the tactical map and try to direct damage control. He didn't have much idea of what the rest of the squadron were up to.

'There was the beginning of a transmission, cut off, placing Captain Lennart under arrest, or would have if it had got that far,' Aldrem explained. 'Then a command-level advisory about Kor Alric being indicted for treason, and some quotes from the man himself that, I'm no trial judge - although it would be an entertaining second career - I reckon that at the very least he convicted himself of lese-majeste. The politics are happening now.'

'You want a firing position on the flagship,' Dordd said.

'I reckon that I can drill the shields with a five gun rapid burst and put a reduced power sixth shot right through the windows of the Imperial suite, burn it out without taking the bridge module with it,' Aldrem stated.

Dordd thought about it. His feelings towards Captain Lennart at the moment were far from clear, but the special assistant to the privy council was unquestionably scum.

'Helm, roll forty degrees starboard,' Dordd ordered. That would bring them into arc. If his career wasn't already ruined, this was going to be another condemnation. Actually, looking down at the battered and still half-molten forward hull of the maimed Dynamic, he wasn't sure he still cared.

'What, we're doing it? Stations, stand by, main guns to central battery control, switch that active finder off and give me passive and boresight projections,' Aldrem reacted, and ordered the command centre team.

Six dots. Line up, set the sequence, last gun in circuit step down all the way - to the equivalent of a few hundred tons of conventional explosive. Enough to blow out the compartment he was aiming for. Even in a moment like this, there was still time for finesse. I really, really hope I'm right, he thought to himself.

This had better be the right thing to do, otherwise I will be very annoyed with…hold on a minute, it was my idea. Actually, he thought as he squeezed the trigger, the right thing to do might have been to call ahead and tell somebody about this.

The five shot were spaced precisely, timed to perfection; hitting and loading the shields, not quite simultaneous - milliseconds apart, enough that the shielding carried away the energy safely, just close enough together that it choked on its own ability to do so. Local overload - allowing the sixth shot to pass through unimpeded, and in the process further demonstrating that windows on the front of a bridge module were an essentially bad idea.

Adannan's programmer and data miner were both still there, trying to figure a path around the lockouts Rythanor and Mirannon had placed on them. Which in itself was evidence of treason, tampering with a highly classified and highly secure system. Not that it was any less inherently indictable than blasting through the windows and bursting a bolt on the throne.

The high backed seat reserved for the use of His Imperial Majesty exploded, vapour and shrapnel shredding both the dark minions. It was a fully successful shot, just a shame that their prime target was absent. They did, however, manage to kill his accountant.


	43. Chapter 43

Adannan narrowed down his focus in the Force until he could perceive one man and one man only. It wasn't as easy as it should have been; because of his peculiar, untrained subconscious way of doing things, Lennart left his Force signature all over the ship.

He seemed to be making, not for Engineering, but for a space in the base of the superstructure. As Adannan let himself glide down the lift shaft, he felt the direction to his prey change, relative motion allowing him to zero in.

Stop, and out of the shaft, into deserted corridors; they were avoiding him, there should be people moving around, the emptiness meant he was being tracked somehow. It didn't really matter how - there were a dozen potential ways, but all of them boiled down to meaning that the crew was complicit with their captain in this. That would stand watching, especially if that was how Lennart intended to surprise him.

He found his prey not where he had expected, in the warren of storage chambers and workshop spaces that made up the damage control bunker, but in the vestibule in front of it.

Open space, with lights that flickered and died as the Sith acolyte approached.

So, Lennart wanted to do this in the dark? It was more atmospheric, even symbolic. Adannan approved, fired up his lightsabre, a bar of scarlet glowing in the darkness. That metaphor suited what he was about to say very well, actually.

Lennart's own lightsabre - which he had no business having, and gripped as he would a torch - lit up, a highly dubious flaring crimson. That was presumption - or willingness? No, simply what he had to hand. Which was wrong. If he was minded to use the dark side as just another tool, if that was all he wanted to do with it…then he would fall as easily and as inevitably as rain.

Eventually. For the moment, Adannan paused and waited. It was what Lennart had been hoping for, to begin with a clash of words, but had been trying to prepare himself for a straightforward brawl.

The fact that it was what the dark Jedi seemed to want too made Lennart think, and Adannan strained trying to overhear it.

'You tell me,' he began by saying.

'Once I understand it myself,' Lennart said. 'You know that I'm playing for time,' he lied trying to plant the idea in Adannan's head, 'you know that I know charging straight in would be an amateur's mistake. I could try to babble you far enough off balance to stand a fighting chance, but I reckon you'll be expecting that…the question here is, what do you have to gain?'

'How do you think you're going to escape the consequences of killing me?' Adannan probed.

'You're assuming you haven't backed me far enough into a corner that I'm willing to lash out now and make up the rationale later - which is what you were trying to do anyway, wasn't it?' Lennart said.

'I always thought the metaphor of extra strings to the bow is far too limiting. Strings on a piano might be closer to the reality,' Adannan said. 'You make plans like tha;, you love being in the centre of the maelstrom where you have to improvise - and get to look smarter than everyone else because they have even less of an idea what's going on.'

'Consciously, that would be criminally unprofessional,' Lennart stopped himself before he could go into a long digression about responsibility and the interactions between layers of command. 'As a professional, I try to do my duty and let my subconscious take care of itself.'

'Interesting. Are you saying that if you had hidden doubts, if you smelt something distinctly rotten about the state of Imperial policy, you would keep them to yourself and try not to worry your crew?' Adannan suggested, tone obviously saying that it wasn't so.

'Considering the interest we take in current affairs around here, you sure you've got a leg to stand on with that argument?' Lennart said, gesturing with the lightsabre in that direction.

'Considering how little of the opinions expressed actually carry your stamp, yes. You have a habit of not committing yourself on paper. Blunt to the point of viciousness, but not on the record,' Adannan replied.

'Nonsense. On a ship as heavily populated as an Imperator we're living out of each other's armpits, and news spreads fast - changes in mood, changes in attitude register immediately. They know what I think, they know what I feel. And incidentally, the majority hate your guts. Too many random acts of violence,' Lennart changed the subject quickly.

'Funny that, I seem to be missing most of my associates,' Adannan said, sensing a potentially useful line of attack.

'Turnabout. Retribution. You could even call it hiding the evidence.'

'With the losses - still well over a hundred thousand in the squadron, all of whom will be aware that you arranged for another unit to make a precision strike on the Imperial suite of your own ship.  
'Forty thousand of those are aware that you did your best to set me up, and, assuming you win, dealt with me yourself. That alone should guarantee you enough notoriety to bring the attention of the Inquisitorius tumbling down on you. You can't afford to kill me, and you've given me every reason to kill you.'

'Except I map back to your own plan one. Become a dark acolyte of the Force - over your dead body.' Lennart smiled a slightly manic smile. 'One dark sider killing another is perfectly expected, isn't it? And we do have reasons.'

'My associates and support team - I ought, strictly speaking, to revenge myself on you for them,' Adannan said, the next step in a train of thought he meant to construct.

'Posing a quandary?' Lennart spotted it. 'If you have that much human empathy left in you, if you cared about them enough to bring me to justice for their murders - then the situation would have played itself out differently and we wouldn't have ended up here.  
'Oh, I know what you're aiming at - that you are a better and more connected person than I took you for, which means your words are not hollow, and a working relationship between us would be possible. Unfortunately, I've also given you every reason to take revenge on me - which you would actually have to try to do if I was going to believe you at this stage,' Lennart pointed out - then realised a moment too late that that was exactly what he didn't want to happen.

'Revenge deferred? You never understood what I was really here for, and it is important enough to postpone dissecting you for the time being,' Adannan said. 'My team will just have to do without their honour guard for the moment until the cause is served.'

'You know, I did wonder if there was a more complex reason for this than simply "grr, argh, power, gimme." Were you actually intending to explain this to me at any point, or just to blackmail, badger and bully me into submission with the dark side of the Force?' Lennart nearly said something about things could have worked out so very differently if the explanation had come at the beginning instead of the end, but - no. Not smart.

Adannan grinned wolfishly. Lennart's weakness was his reason; he could be swayed, he wasn't determined enough, or mad enough, to pick his line and stick to it whatever sense said to the contrary. In this level, in this realm of high politics, that was a weakness.  
Although it was definitely harder than he had expected, playing the role he had assigned to himself. There were still contingency plans and possibilities swirling around Lennart's head; how to manipulate them, make Lennart choose the option that suited himself? The technicalities of getting away with it, even this late in the day after the broadcasting of some pretty damning evidence - well, an accusation of treason can be a very two-edged sword, Adannan thought.

Pose as an agent provocateur, claim to have been pretending to be a traitor and a renegade to prod Lennart into action, and turn round and praise him for his decisiveness and let him in on the secret?  
No, Lennart wouldn't believe it. His calling the emperor 'a deranged, dangerous old fool liable to drag the rest of us down with him' had been sincere; it was impossible to pretend now that he had been faking it.

Go all the way? Why not?

'Captain, you were there for a fair wedge of galactic history; how do you feel about the way it was written up?'

'I have a great deal of admiration for COMPNOR and their ability to rewrite history, if that's what you mean,' Lennart said, cautiously. He had an idea what Adannan was about to say, and was wondering whether or not he ought to let the crew hear it. He was also hoping that Gethrim had had the sense to turn off the backscatter tap; this was something no-one in their right mind would want getting on the record.

'You accept that the reality and the official version diverge?' Adannan said, academically, then put the idea into plainer words- 'You do realise you've been forcefed a pack of lies?'

'My sincere admiration for COMPNOR. The rewriting of the past is standard procedure in circumstances like this, it is a basic part of any new government's playbook, and anybody smart enough to work that out knows how short and messy the life of a dissident in such circumstances usually is,' Lennart pointed out.

'You cowering in terror from the forces of officialdom? A difficult mental picture to believe,' Adannan grunted.

'Reading between the lines is a good and survival enhancing thing, but so is knowing when to sing from the official hymn sheet. I don't think you've got a clear picture in your mind of the alternative,' Lennart said, switching back to the attack.

'Lies and deception for a safe and secure society?' Adannan sneered. That wasn't what he had expected Lennart to say at all.

'Without the Empire, the fall of the Republic should have resulted in at least a generation-long clusterkriff, multiple regional civil wars, the abandonment of interstellar trade and peace, and the death of quadrillions. Yes, lies and deception for a safe and secure society - it's not right in itself, but it's a hell of a lot less wrong than the alternative,' Lennart said forcefully, waving his lightsabre.

Leaving himself wide open for a physical strike, Adannan thought, but verbally - his defence was tight, but there was an opening.

'What if that was about to cease to be the case?' he asked.

'I think I know where you're going with this. Carry on,' Lennart said, trying to undermine Adannan.

'Was the abolition of the Senate the act of a man of sense? Was the use of the Death Star an essential building block in a safe and secure society? The last five years are not what you - what a lot of the old new order - think they were. Yes, a certain manipulation of public confidence is essential-'

'Between that and the sheer pleasure the Dark Side gives you in fooling so many,' Lennart interrupted, and Adannan failed to spot the implicit leading question in time.

'Exactly, and our rivals within the imperial hierarchy are the most lied to of all,' Adannan stormed. 'What does it matter, truth, lies, raving gibbering bullshit, anyone not strong enough to pierce through the lies doesn't deserve the truth. Anyone not strong enough to establish and maintain their own truth-' he stopped himself before he could go on to add the words 'cannon fodder.'

'Well, you've just managed to convince me that the Force is a large part of the problem,' Lennart said, much more calmly than he felt. 'Was that where you were intending to go with this, or were you going to try to tell me how big a lie the Empire is?'

'Not the Empire,' Adannan said, inwardly berating himself for letting Lennart draw him out like that - and then asking, why not? Why not go into full flood? Because that would be an implicit admission that the naval officer had a point - that he had got to his point before the dark acolyte did.

'Not the institution, the Emperor. You reasoned out yourself that, in a government riddled with dark Force users, he would have to be either a puppet or the prince of darkness.'

'Not something I particularly wanted to be right about,' Lennart admitted. 'And when I look at the damage the Force has done to you, and multiply it by how much more powerful he would have to be…'

Adannan managed to let that part pass, with difficulty. 'You still don't get it, do you? He started out damaged; he was powerful in the Force long before he went into politics.  
'He is the head of the order of the dark side.' and just in time, Adannan realised that going into too much detail about His Imperial Majesty's precise status as the master of the Sith would be very, very counterproductive. If there was a chain of argument guaranteed to end with Black Prince wearing the rebel phoenix, it would be reminding Lennart of just how much time they had spent during the clone wars looking for the Sith lord who was supposed to be leading the Separatists.

The idea that Palpatine had been playing both sides was a revelation too far, for the time being. It was also, in any remotely evidential sense, unproven.  
Some of the inner circle - not necessarily the same thing as the privy council - claimed to know that it was true, but there was a lot of wild boasting and exaggeration involved and nothing except the fact that it felt right to back the theory up, and you could say that about any half-baked conspiracy theory.

'Palpatine blackmailed, connived, schemed, manipulated and twisted his way to the top, with the aid of the Dark Side,' Adannan finished, weakly.

'That sounds no different from normal politics - which I think is actually condemnation enough,' Lennart said deadpan. 'That and further proof that the Force makes you stupid. How else could the Jedi have failed to notice that they were under the authority of an office held by their worst enemy? Or are you going to reassure me with the notion that the dark side is inherently more devious, twisted and sneaky?'

'Damn you, will you stop going off at tangents? The Jedi are dead and gone, which was less painful than they deserved. I'm trying to tell you that the man you owe allegiance to is not the man you thought he was - he's the hollow shell of his former self, a black pit of rage, hunger and the Force - all the brilliant twisting wit he used to raise himself to power is gone, eaten away,' Adannan shouted.

'This contradicts my line of argument how, exactly?' Lennart couldn't resist saying. If Adannan was trying to argue him round, he must have realised we have a dozen different ways of killing him with the ship's systems, and a dozen more chances if he makes it as far as open space. Good. Probably.

'Let me just see if I have this right,' Lennart said. 'You and the lesser lords of darkness - or just you? - think the old man's lost the plot. You're fishing round for things to use against him, any scrap of knowledge about him and his past and methods, or about the Force. Anything that might come in handy, and you have some very high clearances or good slicers to do it with, which is how you managed to latch on to the 118th Fleet incident. That with the ultimate aim of cutting him even further out of the loop than he already is-'

'The Imperial Household and the Privy Council do the day to day work of running the empire, but between diving deeper and deeper into the Force, he remains well aware of the details, and every major change in Imperial organisation or policy crosses his desk,' Adannan interrupted. 'The abolition of the Senate was the mark of a maddened old man,' ignoring Lennart's muttering about how he personally would have been a damn sight less moderate if he had to listen to the tedious old bastards drone on all day, 'the stamp of the Dark Side was clear, and you don't think Tarkin had enough mechanical intuition to come up with the Death Star on his own, do you?'

'A detail,' Lennart asked. 'Tarkin's flaws were those of viewpoint, not of intellect. He disliked the Force as much as any man, and hated telepathy in particular with the passion of someone who had a lot to hide. He should have noticed.'

'Exactly, viewpoint,' Adannan said. 'He saw himself as a brilliant political manipulator, and he was egotist enough to see himself mirrored in others, and assume that the same was true of His Majesty. He failed to reach out far enough to realise there was so much more than that.'

'A "more" that you yourself reckon has become counterproductive,' Lennart noted. 'This plan of yours, digging into the incident, investigating the old methods of programming loyalty in the living - I suppose your ultimate goal would be to be able to enact Special Order 66, or something like it, on His Majesty himself?'

'You're asking me to confess to plotting regicide,' Adannan quibbled, not entirely logically. Perhaps he had finally started listening to himself and realised just how far he had gone. He had wanted to lead Lennart into this, a fragment of truth at a time. Instead, it was all coming out at once, the floodgates burst.

'Why not?' Lennart asked. 'I've already got you for treason. No way back. Your only way out of this, now that the situation has got this far, is to convince me, my crew and the rest of the squadron. Convince us that this plot against His Majesty is real, that it is necessary, and that it stands more than a whelk's chance in a supernova. How can you expect to succeed against the living embodiment of darkness you're making him out to be?'

Many of us may fail, and fall,' Adannan said, 'but the scheme will survive because it is so much in the tradition of the Dark Side. We can hide virtually in plain sight because His Majesty expects jockeying for position, conniving, scheming - he accepts plots and treachery as the inevitable consequence of hiring capable, ambitious men.  
'Our best protection,' the dark acolyte smiled, 'is his own assumption that having his minions try to kill him is nothing that out of the ordinary for the Dark Side of the Force.'

'Which explains amongst other things,' Lennart went off at a tangent again, 'why there is no constitutional mechanism for succession. There couldn't be - or, at least, what there is runs through the traditions of the dark side. What about the rest of us? I mean, if you actually read his texts, he's the only academic political theorist I ever met who had a sense of humour. Well, closer to desert-dry wit, actually. Who do you plan to get to replace him - or is it a simple case of who chibs, wins?'

'What?' Adannan asked - he could guess from the context, but that Lennart took such a swing into the surreal and slangy was not good. It meant that he wasn't taking it seriously at all - or that he was internalising it and thinking deeply, while on the surface he played silly buggers trying to buy time.

'Oh. Colloquialism used by some of my engineering crew. The act of using a weapon - in context, succession by right of assassination. By powerful men, and women, controlling major organs of the Imperial state and no qualms about using them to their own ends. How is this much different from the worst case scenario?' Lennart probed, tone carefully level.

'It is the way of the dark side - the strong climb higher on the piled bodies of the weak. Metaphorically.' Or, on occasions, not. 'It is a good and a healthy system, the way things ought to be, except that Palpatine has escaped from the reach of the rest of us.' Adannan searched for a metaphor that would help convince the quizzical naval officer.

'The Empire replaced the zombie aristo-plutocratic pretence of democracy that paralysed the Republic,' he failed to find one, 'with a vibrant, living democracy of violence, in which every man can rise as far as his abilities can take him, and retain what he can keep hold of - and yes, the public mindspace is part of what's to play for.'  
'It is an open field,' Adannan continued, getting carried away with his theme. Lennart was far from certain that he was right, counting the Names and Numbers who had slid into the hierarchy, and noticed that even he didn't go so far as to claim it was in any way a level field - 'and that those of us who can call on the Dark Side of the Force have risen far and fast is not a coincidence.  
'You have that power, and you are close to a secret that can help tilt the balance. Join us. Join with us, and help remove the dark hand squeezing the Empire to madness and death. There are so many minor matters on which we are in agreement - that order is a made thing, that it is never better to be less powerful, that…you could do the Empire - and yourself - a great service by removing the dead weight. At the top.'  
Adannan ran to a halt, slightly out of breath, and wondering why he felt so on the defensive, why he had felt the need to explain himself at all. Lennart's half-realised gestalt lent him a power he did not actually possess, of course, but - anyway, he was right, he could be a great asset.

Is he going to go for it, or am I going to have to cut him down and run for it? What does he think, what does he feel? Laurentia was right, damn him for having her killed - and now, Lennart might be thinking that for the best of reasons at the time, he has taken so much away from me, Adannan thought, he can't possibly trust me.  
I should have spent more time with him, got to know him more as a human being, but every encounter blew up into a clash of personalities. The weight of our official masks distorted the issue. Mine, anyway.

Lennart was actually guiltily aware that he had made up his mind early on, and was skimming through the things that had been said later on, trying to decide if any of them were worth altering his judgement and his plans over. On balance…no.

'You know,' he said, casually, trying not to give it away and draw an attack before he was ready, 'there is one power I do have, that seems to be exceptionally rare among the servants of night, that might be of some use.'

There was a general shuffling and scuffling, and somehow the chamber seemed fuller all of a sudden.

The last move, Lennart thought. Checkmate.

'Lads?' Thirty engineering plasma torches flared into life and brightened to combat mode, half-lighting snarling faces and looming bodies. 'Get him.'

Adannan had paid them no respect - groundlings, he had thought - he had scorned them, got some of their friends killed and injured, and at the last managed to incriminate himself quite spectacularly. They had every reason to get him.

All thirty moved in on the dark acolyte. Adannan tried to lash out for their minds and blast them back with confusion and terror, met the combined resistance of all thirty backed by their commander and patron. Couldn't bite deep enough to do anything, tried to narrow his focus to a few, but then they were on him.

Thirty amateurs, in blade to blade, surrounding. Should be possible - no, not thirty amateurs. One amateur and thirty hobbyists, who may never have drawn blood except by accident but who knew the moves, knew the tactics. They refused to give him the asymmetry he needed, contracted in on him in a jagged ring of light.

Adannan lashed out in a defensive flurry, probing and hacking, and the ring moved to meet him, he had his sabre smashed away from his target by half a dozen blades, and the rest who could reach him stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.

By the time Lennart wound his way through the melee to take the dark acolyte's head, the glory and the blame, Adannan's body was in shreds and he had wounds enough to kill him fifty times over.

The dismembered remains scattered down to the deck, the torches flickered down from bright combat to safe, and they turned to face their commanding officer.  
Lennart stepped back, swept his sabre up in salute, brought it down again. 'So now you know why I needed your help, and just what sort of maniac we were dealing with. Couldn't have done it without you.  
'Two things. Feel free to dismiss his words as the ravings of a man drowning in the Dark Side - but if you can't, think how very many people there are, for how many reasons, who wouldn't want to hear a word of that repeated. If you think there was anything to it, then think it to yourself, very quietly,' Lennart said, slowly and deliberately.

'Second - Vilberksohn?'

'Sir.' Followed by a muttered 'kriffit.'

'I knew you'd be in here somewhere. Organise a droid detail to get this mess - messes, by now - cleared up. Attach a thermal demo charge to Kor Alric's light sabre before you jettison it. Thank you all, and dismiss.' The blades were de-activated, and the men, strangely sombre, filed away.

Lennart relaxed, switched off his own sabre. Felt the tense, hunched feeling between his shoulder blades ebb away. The ship felt cleaner, now, a stain removed. When he was sure there was no-one left in earshot, he looked down at the severed head on the pile of mangled remains and said,  
'I think you may have a point. It'll bear investigation, certainly, but quietly, and in my own time and own way - I'll be damned, and I mean that literally, if I do it under your lead and as a part of your cabal.'

The Force must be getting to me, he thought; I'm starting to talk to the dead. I'll know it's gone too far when I start expecting answers. Even if it is only "So why did you have to kill me then, you bastard?"

He turned away from the splash of body parts, then, and headed back to the bridge. There was a fair amount still to do.


	44. Chapter 44

Dramatis Personae;

On board His Imperial Majesty's Starship Black Prince, Imperator I-refit-II, hull no. 721

Captain of the Line Jorian Lennart, commanding officer Operational Pursuit Squadron 851-Yod, pathologically reluctant force user  
Lieutenant-Commander (brevet Commander) Vasimir Mirhak-Ghulej, near-human, Executive Officer (suspended)  
Commander Ielamathrum Brenn, human, male, Navigation Officer and heir-apparent

Air Commodore Antar Olleyri, commanding fighter forces, 851-Yod  
Squadron Leader Quarin Vattiera, Alpha One  
Major Kulban Levkow, Beta One  
Squadron Leader Aron Jandras, Gamma One  
Lieutenant-Commander Franjia Rahandravell, Epsilon One  
Pilot Officer Zhered Gavrylsk, near-human, Epsilon Three  
Flight Lieutenant Ardrith Yatrock, Epsilon Five  
Flight Lieutenant Paludo Kramaner, Epsilon Nine  
Flight Lieutenant Leirac Yrd, Epsilon adjutant  
Squadron Technical Master Sargeant Billis Oregal, senior technician, Epsilon  
Squadron Leader Romolano Avin, Mu One

High Colonel, brevet Major-General QAG-111, commanding 276th Atrisian (provisional 721st Armoured) Legion, ground forces 851-Yod  
Captain Omega-17-Blue-Aleph-1, commander special operations detachment (Jedi Hunter Team)  
Surgeon-Lieutenant BE-4413, medical officer, C coy Boarding Batallion  
WO2 Omega-17-Blue-Aleph-3, investigations specialist, Jedi Hunter Team

Engineer-Commander Gethrim Mirannon, Chief Engineer and reluctant force user  
Lieutenant Domolaris Ranner, power systems  
Junior Lieutenant Levin Kitrich, apprentice, ion drive  
Junior Lieutenant Idoni Tjalmin, apprentice, hyperdrive  
Charge Chief Petty Officer Mallis Vilberksohn, hotel systems

Commander Obral Wathavrah, Gunnery Officer  
WO1 Xarriyar Pernarin, 'A' watch local control designator officer  
Lieutenant Pellor Aldrem, detached to HIMS Dynamic on instructor duty  
Petty Officer Areath Suluur, tactical sensors and comms  
Leading Spaceman Gort Fendon, power systems  
Senior Chief Petty Officer Eddaru Gendrik, subassembly commander  
Leading Spaceman Felric Tarshkavik, weapon mechanic  
Chief Petty Officer Krivin Hruthhal, subassembly commander  
Ordinary Spaceman Jhareylia Hathren, attached (ex Rebel spy)

Lieutenant-Commander Shandon Rythanor, Com-Scan Officer  
Senior Lieutenant Ondrath Ntevi, Com-Scan 'B' Watch Commander  
Chief Petty Officer Frevath Cormall, Signal Interpretation

Surgeon-Lieutenant Commander Zubaide Blei-Korberkk, chief medical officer  
Surgeon-Lieutenant Uustinan Bergeron, medical monitoring

Parent Formation;  
Rear-Admiral Stephan Rawlin, Commanding Fleet Destroyer Squadron 851  
Engineer-Constructor Captain Philemon Sholokhov, Chief Technical Officer, 851

On board units attached to 851-Yod;  
Captain Delvran Dordd, commanding Arrogant-class [Anon SD II] Star Destroyer Dynamic  
Commander Ilarchu Ridatt, executive officer

Commander Stannis Lycarin, commanding Victory-III [Anon SD I] class Star Destroyer Perseverance  
Commander Jiae Sarlatt, commanding Fulgor [Anon Star Frigate I] class Provornyy  
Lieutenant-Commander Ebbirnoth Yeklendim, commanding Fulgor [Anon Star Frigate I] class Grey Princess

Group Captain Konstantin Vehrec, commander subcraft group, ranking officer Venator-class Star Destroyer Obdurate, Sweep Line  
Senior Lieutenant Ludovic Caliphant, chief officer  
Senior Lieutenant Garrant Kirritaine, gunnery officer

Lieutenant-Commander Karl-Anton Raesene, commanding Demolisher-class star frigate Obdurate  
Section Leader of the Investigative Service (ISB) Michalis Fer Salif  
Deputy Assistant Section Leader (ISB) Dorind Salif

Senior Field Agent (Interdiction) Eris Rontaine, Commander Customs Squadron 2263-H-975, detached to Starfleet service

Commander Aythellar Barth-Elstrand, commanding Meridian-class [Acclamator-II] Comarre Meridian, Recon Line A

Commander Vianca Falldess, commanding Meridian-class [Acclamator-II] Tarazed Meridian, Recon Line B  
Lieutenant-Commander Prokhor Subradal, Chief Engineer  
Senior Lieutenant Nakazon Alurin, Navigator

Lieutenant-Commander Conor Kovall, commanding RIF variant Strike [Verberor] Medium Frigate Blackwood

Uninvited guests;  
Kor Alric Adannan, dark jedi  
'Laurentia', 6NL-108-554E, aide/public relations  
Banaar, aide/thug  
Myfara Somoti, cyborg pilot  
Igal, twi'lek slave brain-hacking test subject, liberated  
Reni, twi'lek slave brain-hacking test subject, liberated

Vineland Sector;  
Moff Edro Vlantir Xeale, Falleen sector governor  
Vice-Admiral Domenic Gerlen, subsector commander  
Doctor Edward Nygma, consultant attached to Sector Escort and Patrol Command (semi-retired Ubiqtorate analyst)


	45. Chapter 45

Four platoons of spacetroopers, each four squads of eight men and a sergeant, a lieutenant, a platoon sergeant and two specialists. In a line platoon those specialists would be a heavy weapon team, but that wasn't something spacetroopers were short of. Instead, sappers accompanied the platoon, and at least one of the troopers in each squad would be cross trained.

Using the ship's systems against boarders, surging artificial gravity, trapping them with the blast doors, evacuating air or flooding with gas and corrosives, was a strange lacuna in the manual; it had been part of the prewar Republic fleet instructions, but had been an afterthought if at all during the war.

The Imperial Starfleet in general hardly considered it, being at relatively little risk of being boarded by the undermanned Rebel Alliance, but Black Prince took the idea seriously, both for and against. There were a couple of other things they did differently, too.

The standard loadout of spacetrooper armour had to have been specified by an accountant, an academic theorist or a ten year old boy; too many options, too funky, too little satisfaction of the basics.  
Black Prince's platoons stripped the ridiculous 'blaster cannon' that had more in common with a disintegrator pistol, deleted the touching-distance laser cutters, removed the absurd claw-cuffs that did nothing other than prevent the trooper wielding any conventional weapon. Instead, the power supply for the laser cutters was wired up to an otherwise standard T-21 squad light repeater. The squad support slot was filled by a trooper lugging a separate generator for an E-Web heavy repeater. One other major difference; instead of being commanded from the assault shuttle, the platoon commanders of the boarding battalion led from the front. Actually, two of Black Prince's platoons, one each from Fist and Voracious.

Their target was Admonisher's hangar bay.

In practise, that was usually the most heavily defended location on the ship. Unless the order 'repel boarders' had been passed, the majority of any ship's troop complement would be close to the launch bays they deployed from.

At first order, their job was to use that very convenient natural hole in the target's hull to gain access and head for Engineering, take control of the Rebel heavy destroyer's systems.  
At second order, their job was to threaten to do that - pose a threat that the enemy had to devote a high proportion of their troop complement to resisting. Tie them down and shoot them up. Their mission was simply to kill; the nominal objective would be a bonus.

As they floated into the bay and took stock of the battlefield, a couple of things became immediately obvious. The bay had been hit; there was a huge, soft edged-molten-gash in the deckhead and port side, the hangars were open to the main bay and cleaved-through decks visible. It was strewn with crates and containers, the materiel ripped out of the planetary yards and intended to set up a new Rebel base. Lots of cover, people milling around, damage control teams, evacuees, some crew, some ground forces.

No specific instructions regarding prisoners, so standard procedure applied; if they try to surrender, and if the situation is such that you can accept that without endangering the other troopers, do so. If not, or if you spot them before they spot you, fair game. There were perhaps two thousand people in the bay. Some of them went for their guns; that was enough. The no. 2 platoon leader, Lieutenant Kartr, was the first to give the order. "Fire."

The situation on board the Rebel ship was already chaotic enough. They were a largely human crew under a Mon Cal captain; he had trained them well, forged them into a remarkably effective fighting machine, but in combat orders rather than information had descended from the bridge module.  
Like most Mon Cal, combat did not come naturally to the former skipper of the Mon Evarra, and like many of those who did eventually become good at it he had done so by forcing himself into the part, consciously becoming a book-ridden martinet, more autocratic than the aristocrats of the Empire. He had told his crew almost nothing of what was actually happening, not even whether they were winning or losing. Aldrem's vengeful volley into the upper turret complex had done more damage than he knew; the millisecond sequence of hits had driven a breach into the heavy destroyer's hull deep enough to touch primary gunnery control, one of the main alternative control points.

Any battery direction centre could switch into the main data links and take over gun control, but it was much harder for it to step up two levels to alternate bridge. No command solutions there. Main engineering was the next obvious alternative control point, and it was that the spacetroopers were making for, before anyone got in control again and told the Rebs what to do.

The four platoons made one major mistake right from the start; dispersal of fire. Each assumed that it had to cover all of the bay, and prioritised accordingly - that meant that the most critical threat, a group of flight techs trying to clear the wreckage away and get at the deep storage racks to get something flying, got hit by everybody. With everything. The short, staccato, stabbing pulses of blaster cannon, the long crackling streams of fire from the repeaters sounding like an endless walk through autumn leaves, and leaving a charred mess behind them like the aftermath of a bonfire, and over two hundred frag grenades hit the relatively small group. Secondary detonations added brilliant white flares to the mix, and left the upper forward face of the bay burning, giving off choking duraplast smoke.

"Well," Captain VA-811 said, from the command squad of first stormtrooper platoon, "overkill is good too… fire sectors; Voracious platoon rear left, Kartr front left, my unit front right, Fist rear right. On jets, disperse to formation and give fire, neutralise opposition at point of entry then proceed to primary target."

He gave the order in long, formal style to remind them of their duty after that little fire fest; boiled down, it meant kill everything in sight.

"Disable the pressure curtain?" Kartr asked. That would flush the air in the bay out - the emergency doors were shot away - and kill many of the crew. Even if it had been Rebel practise to suit up, there were a lot of refugees and evacuees from the planet, and volunteers for the ship, who simply didn't have the kit. There was enough damage; large parts of the ship around the bay would decompress. The other side of that was that whatever internal blast doors and ray shields hadn't been activated already undoubtedly would be by the loss of atmosphere. It would make it harder to fight their way through the ship, trading an advantage now for a harder fight later. Kartr knew that, and was asking if the captain thought it was worth the cost.

"Not worth it," VA-811 said.

"This ship is pretty badly beat up," Kartr added, noticing one of his second squad raise their gun to fire up at the deckhead of the bay; four rebel groundpounders with heavy A280 battle rifles, crawling out along one of the gantries to shoot at the spacetroopers.  
Kartr aimed up at a support pylon, splattered it with fire, was joined by one of the E-webs; pointless, part of the ship's structure protected by the ship's heat sinks and force fields. He started to track on to them, but the rest of the platoon got there first, hosed them down and reduced them to pink rain; then they hosed down the access hatch the rebels had crawled out of.

"Minitorps, restricted-six," VA-811 decided. Restricted-zero would have meant release authority could only be given by company commanders, i.e., him. Restricted-one allowed squad leaders to make the shoot/no-shoot decision. Restricted-six was good; it became the platoon commander's call to use the lethal little things. Kartr wasted no time in lobbing one at the hatch, detonating just within and sending a flare of blast back out into the bay.

"Who remembered their striptape dispenser?" he asked looking at a clutch of the Rebel yard workers, evacuees, who were waving their arms in the air trying to surrender.

A handful of the ship's crew, armed, tried to push them out of the way and shoot at the spacetroopers; the surrendered rebels turned round and started brawling with the crew. They knew what was liable to happen - whatever side they were on, a group that seemed to surrender then started shooting again could expect no mercy.

Too late; the crew got a few bolts off, and blaster fire and grenades ripped them apart.

One group of Rebels tried to use a container as a bunker, laser-cutting firing ports in it and shooting out; simple solution - lob a proton minitorp back through one of the firing ports, and watch as the container turned into an instant crematorium, thin jets of blast spraying out of the ports more dangerous than the Reb rifle fire.

A lot of the Rebel surface to space transport work had been done by the small craft the destroyer had had when she was beached, a lot of LAATs, some the vehicle version with extended grapples to take containers. They were mostly broken winged and broken backed, flattened by the concussion of the hit Black Prince had landed on the bay, but some of them weren't broken down far enough.  
They were mostly in first platoon's sector, the captain and most of his men hosing down the broken-open decks and compartments of the troop complement bay; one squad did take notice, sent a spray of blaster fire cutting down some of the Rebel technicians, but not fast enough.

The Rebs were trying to run a power cable from one transport with a functioning powerplant to another which still had its weapons. Most of the techs died, but they managed it.  
They managed to get one small ball turret working, the convergence beam antimechanoid laser. The Alliance deck-hand in the turret was clearly an amateur, but if there was an easier weapon to hit with than a continuous laser, it hadn't been invented.

The brilliant green stream slashed out, slicing the air, splashing harmlessly off the far bulkhead, tracking onto the hovering troopers who were now turning to meet it.  
Two got caught in the hose of fire, one slashed across the stomach, he spasmed, triggered his jets and slammed into the starboard bulkhead, the other got caught square in the chest and thrashed as the laser burnt through, the rebel gunner holding the beam on target as metal and man flashed to vapour.

The Reb was too busy thinking 'ooh, cool' to track on to a new target; the other obvious drawback of a continuous beam is it's very easy to see where you're firing from.

Most of first and second platoons fired on them, torpedoes and blasters. The ball took a hit and exploded, the power cable flashed back to the active powerplant which got hit itself half a second later as the row of parked transports was pounded. Better safe than sorry.

"Gal?" Kartr commed alpha squad's heavy weapons man. "Ditch the E-web, you're carrying one of those."

"Love to, LT, but we'd have to glue one back together first," the heavy weapon specialist said, looking over the line of burning, half-melted wrecks.

"By platoon, first and third squads move out," VA-811 ordered. Half of each platoon moved out to take positions on the edge of the bay facing along the routes they planned to take, and began shooting to suppress, laying down fire.  
Second and fourth would move past them, if this was a normal operation. It wasn't - basically tunnel fighting, where there often was not room for one unit to leapfrog by another. The only thing to do was fan out, move hard and fast on as many axes of attack as possible.

What there was left of the Rebels would be moving to surround and contain; in Imperial fleet service, these ships carried fifty-six battalions, three reinforced or four understrength battlegroups. The Rebellion couldn't scrape up that kind of numbers, or at least not have them lying around waiting for something to do, but the ship would have arms lockers sized accordingly.  
So, they would be facing a lot of amateurs, armed mainly with anti-droid heavy rifles that probably did have enough power to hurt a spacetrooper. That didn't change the basic plan - surge the defence, disorient them and prevent them having the chance to.

Kartr called up their stored schematic of the Shockwave-class, tried to match it in the overlaid imager to the blasted, part-molten, junk-strewn mess in front of him, to pick what ought to be a profitable line of advance.

"Half squads," enough units to make multiple thrusts, individually large enough to secure their own flanks - "there, there, there-" eight gaps in the tangle of wreckage that should leave them covering each other and lead them to the target area.

Each squad would break down into two groups of four, their sergeant would take one block, one of the command team would take the other half. Eight groups of five, the groups with the sappers using the main access corridor with the control nodes. Pentagon formations, two front, two middle watching the flanks, walls chambers and side corridors, one rear guard. Kartr was right front of his half-squad, E-web on his left.

The platoon moved out heading through the small craft maintenance area, which backed on to the heavy destroyer's own workshops, which were connected to main machinery control. VA-811 would be paralleling them, Fist's and Voracious' platoons lapping round on either side, and what they were doing was at least as much about racing the other platoons as it was fighting the enemy.

Not that the Rebs intended to have nothing to say about it. There were half a dozen techs working on an X-wing with one wing missing, parts scattered all over the pad, trying to get some use out of its lasers, with a rifle squad trying to cover them. Kartr and the squad support gunner hosed them down, tore them apart in a blizzard of red bolts; one of the flankers passed a fire request, Kartr okayed it, one of the Y-wings caught a torpedo in its ion cannon turret.

The maintenance bay was full of containers, rammed in on top of each other and shoved together at all angles to clear some room for the doomed fighters to launch. Could have been a maze if the spacetroopers' sensors hadn't been too good for that.

What had moved them, though, the tractor beams - take them under fire - or, ah, powerlifters. Partly gravitic themselves, reacting off the ship's systems, they had brute force to spare for when things weren't working. They were huge, industrial machinery, could lift tanks. One of them had a Z-95's blaster cannon kitbashed on to it - there were five of them, one more with a lashup of infantry weapons, the other three apparently intending to rely on brute strength.

"I like it," Gal said, diving for cover behind a container full of machine parts. "Use some of that load capacity for armour, fit a decent generator-"

"And you'd be driving an AT-ST. There's a reason we don't take those things into tunnel fighting," Kartr said, ducking out of the way of the one with the cannon.

Somebody, probably the same somebody responsible for the loadout, hadn't been thinking about their protective gear either. The physical armour only tended to confirm the usual Imperial doctrine about powersuits. Complicated, expensive to procure and time-consuming to maintain, and more trouble than they were worth. The Impervium plating, trademarks and all, added significantly less to their combat survivability than what had really been an afterthought of a system, flight navigational shielding. The suit management systems were supposed to shut that down as soon as they touched down and started walking, but anyone with an interest in not being dead soon worked out how to override that.

Kartr had an idea. He didn't bother saying 'cover me' or anything like that. Speed would protect him. He fired up his ion thrusters, sideslipped out from behind the container and jetted forward. The armed powerlifter got off a burst, but Kartr didn't think he had been hit; caught in the flare though, he tumbled, braked, slammed off the far bulkhead, found himself floating upside down behind the powerlifter.

Too good a shot to resist. Straight up the backside of the lifter, a minitorpedo. The 'lifter had no time to react; the quarter kiloton warhead exploded, breaching the fusion generator which added its thin wash of plasma, vapourising the Rebel and blasting a huge hole in the deck, followed by a gout of flame as everything in the compartment below ignited.

"I think the tensors are down," Kartr said from where the blast had shoved him against the container.

"No shit, LT," Gal said, hosing one of the other lifters with E-web fire, shredding the body and the pilot.

"Kartr," VA-811's voice, short, disciplined bursts of fire audible in the background. "I've had four junior platoon leaders who tried to upstage me and get my job by doing crazy hotdog crap like that." Brief pause, crash of a minitorp, crunching noises of grenades. "I've outlived all of them. Guess why."

"Because the odds caught up with them and they got killed doing crazy hotdog crap?" Kartr guessed, pulling himself off the deck and looking for more targets.

"Got it in one," VA-811 said. "Stick to the basics."

There were store and workshop chambers on the fringes of the bay, a heavy blast retention bulkhead aft that the sappers would have to open the blast doors in, a main access corridor beyond that and the outer edges of the main machinery area on the other side. The access corridor was probably the Rebel main line of resistance, and what of the Rebel troops had just been brushed aside rather than cut down would be attacking them from the rear soon.

"Infantry elements of first regiment, entering through the dorsal crater now." The welcome message over divisional comms. "Infantry elements second regiment, entering through the superstructure damage now." Through the neck of the decapitated bridge tower. That changed the game a bit.

Over Plrlanilthre, two things happened more or less at once. The rRasfenoni main mobile force decided to see if they really could take on the cream of the Imperial Starfleet; and the Imperial flagship decided to see if he could slice through the rRasfenoni fixed defences.

The septangular aliens didn't have all that much in terms of a navy, just maybe enough to take out the understrength local sector group, if they had happened to be looking the other way at the time. Their thirty worlds between them could scrape up six first line destroyer-class ships, two home-built and the same disc and superstructure shape, broad face on, lots of medium-small guns by the look of it.  
The other four were from the Clone Wars, a pair of Separatist Providence-class destroyer-carriers - credible ships, roughly equal to if not a slight advance on the Republican Venator.

Two genuine rarities, where they had found them from must be a tale - a pair of Rothana's DDX-14, the so-called 'stretch Acclamator', an unsuccessful attempt by Rothana to defy their parent company and branch out into the warship market on their own, capitalising on the success of their existing product. As a ship of war, the DDX-14 was technically successful, as an economic act the project had been suicidal. There were very few of them, and they were rarely seen.

They were slippery little things, excellent power to weight, rating towards the upper end of light destroyer - just under twice the reactor output of a Venator - with large numbers of light weapons, fourteen quad turrets for twenty-five teraton turbolasers. They would have been a serious sales contender with the Imperator-I, and a lightweight, higher efficiency alternative to the Imperial-II. Alternative but hopefully not better.

Six much larger ships, armed merchant cruisers based on heavy freighter hulls, slow, heavy, grungy-looking things plodding their way down the sky. Cube shaped actually, three sides covered in low-pressure high efficiency ion nozzles, the corner at the centre of the other three sides the bow, one edge up and the aft corner of that the bridge module. Well if chaotically armed, their flank weapons bays a mixed bag of all sorts - including many missile launch tubes, must be concussion, even the Imperial Starfleet was reluctant to pay for that many proton torps.

All six of them posed a credible threat; each carried some form of major weapon in the bow position, sparred and plated into the main forward loading hatch. Planetary defence artillery. Two were packing v-150s, the bow hatch being built into a socket the ball turret could rotate in, one had an improvised-looking tractor-based kinetic accelerator-launcher; the other three took the concept of sniping to new and ridiculous lengths. Built into the bow of each of them was a gargantuan 3.3-petaton w-165 planetary defence turbolaser, some of the largest single weapon mounts ever made.

Imperial Intelligence should have been keeping a closer watch on sales of those things, considering that they tended to be bought by governments which expected to have to fight for their lives.

There were many models of lighter, cheaper, less ridiculous surface to orbit artillery, a lot of it going cheap as second-hand from the Clone Wars.

Realistically, in this day and age, LTL was enough for civil enforcement, light mediums - up to the twenty-five gigaton level- were enough to keep off any plausible pirate. The only reason anyone could need a brand new w-series superheavy was to fight the capital warships of the Imperial Starfleet. That alone would have been enough to draw the attention of the regional support group, if the sector had been closely enough watched that anybody had noticed and drawn their attention to it.

Still, they were only heavy merchant hulls. Firepower without the speed or survivability to back it up - they would find it very difficult to make good on the threat they posed. There were another dozen lighter-armed merchants, falling into the destroyer class, less spectacularly armed - four of them based on liners, they had the speed for decent footwork at least.

Frigates - the crew of the watching Goshawk lost count, the computers added up eighty. Mostly military, mostly local build with light-heavy turbolasers and turboblasters, but including four of the kinetic-attack bombers, nice to see them making themselves obvious at last.

Three more Alliance build-Liberators. A wide assortment. Their battle plan, the Imperials were guessing - engage and prevent reinforcements? Move over Goshawk and bombard? Equally plausible as ideas, but their trajectory suggested they were to attack the Imperial warship.

To make an attack run on the ship in the upper atmosphere, they had to remove as small and oblique a segment of the shielding as possible, which meant they had to come in on essentially the same outline - grazing approach path as the Imperial dreadnought Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy.

The speeding capital ship emerged from hyperspace five seconds after and fifteen light seconds astern of the mobile group. Neither side could afford time to be surprised; the rRasfenoni had been dreading and preparing for this for centuries, Tichy only had to bless - or curse - his luck and take careful aim.

No elegance about this, just an abrupt, bloody knife fight as the rRasfenoni flipped end for end to take on the dreadnought. An energy weapon kill was unlikely, but the hits would weaken the ship, weaken the shields - a kinetic attack might just succeed.

They shot at him anyway. Streams of turbolaser and turboblaster fire of every colour and variety of bolt, the almost sheets of light from the superheavies, pulsing flares of mass driver tracer and crackling ion fire lashed out at the Imperial ship.

Convarrian on the Tichy, a back-seat driver, had no real choice, couldn't possibly change the vector of his big ship enough to avoid passing through them. So much for fancy plans. "Engage - armed merchants the priority."

ECM clouded the issue as far as possible, and Tichy did what footwork he could - electronically the lynchpins of the enemy force were the regular destroyers, the armed merchants that made up most of their heavy metal had inappropriate fire control and barely-upgraded civil navigational sensors. It would be essential to remove the destroyers, but not yet - whittle down a little of the force, before working on the multipliers.

The big Mandator was not short of his own weapons to bring to bear. The anticapital armament, eleven battery groups each of four single ball turret fourteen hundred and twenty teraton superheavies, eleven more groups of six smaller single ball turrets for seven hundred and twenty teraton cannon.  
Ball rather than cylinder mounts made them faster to traverse and more accurate - but also more expensive and time consuming to maintain, and the sheer weight and recoil of the heavy cannon still made them marginal against small ships. That was fine, they had plenty of big enough targets to be getting on with.

The mainstay mid-range armament of the dreadnaught was ten batteries, each six twin ball turrets for three hundred and twenty teraton heavy cannon; they could track fast and stably enough to take on a destroyer-class target, and did.

Sixteen batteries supported them, each five twin turrets for hundred and seventy-five teraton cannon, the same weapons as the Imperator-I on a drastically different mounting - metres more thickness of armour, local component shields and capacitors moved out of the gun house into the barbette, main burden of local control shifted to the battery command centre, the capital-secondary version of the same gun mount.

For the smaller and lighter craft, twenty-five groups of smaller heavy turbolasers, each four twin turrets for the old faithful medium-heavy DBY-827 seventy teraton cannon in destroyer-standard fast pointing light turrets this time. They were the anti-frigate and anti-corvette outfit, along with the hundred and eight sextuple half-teraton medium and four hundred and thirty two octuple dual purpose light turbolasers. Rounded out with ninety-six strategic bombardment and three hundred and seventy-two tactical missile launch tubes, and a point defence fit designed to protect against the same.

Outnumbered? Massively. Outmassed? Considering the dead weight of the armed merchants, multibillion-ton ships designed for trillion ton payloads, yes. Outgunned - no.

The rainbow of tracer that splattered out of the rRasfenoni mobile force met a solid wall of shades of green coming the other way. The improvised heavy gunships would have been hard put to it even against the target they were expecting, but against a fast moving ship in open space... there were explosions at both ends, as the superheavy planetary defence cannon managed to punch enough energy through even a dreadnought's shields to raise vapourisation flares on the hull, and the crack Imperial scored quickly on the slow, clumsy armed freighters.

Heavily built for heavy loads, admittedly, certainly not the worst hulls that could have been chosen for the job, but first-line warships they were not.

Tichy splattered fire across all of them to begin with, punching through shields and ripping into all six, but after three seconds narrowed focus down to the three most dangerous - the kinetic launcher, one of whose thousand ton impactors gouged a hole in the dreadnought's superstructure, and the two ion cannon carriers.

Again the decision loop. To make a choice, see it begin to be carried out, and evaluate whether it was working - it varied from individual to individual, but the standard the Imperial Starfleet tried to train to was ten seconds, and tried to achieve in combat was five.

By the end of the first decision cycle, three of the rRasfenoni heavy weapons ships were gone.

One of the ion cannon ships had taken a full battery volley right in the ball of the v-150, the capacitors had let go, adding to the blast - the entire front end of the heavy freighter had been peeled back and burnt away, opening up blasted structural sparring into a half-molten shuttlecock shape.

The kinetic armed merchant was brought under the heaviest fire, kicked to one side by a cluster of shot slamming into one side of the bow, leaving it side on where it was raked from stem to stern, broken open with powerplant and engines exploding.

The last ion carrier tried to evade, took a set of hits along the spine that broke the ship's back and left it burning uncontrollably.

Two walls of torpedoes and missiles closed on each other; Tichy had launched out and parallel, warheads fanning out then converging to avoid losing them to the main stream of fire and give the target's point defence more work to do.

Most of the rRasfenoni hadn't thought of that, and there were flashes of light all across the formation as warheads were caught in the flood of incoming and outgoing fire. The rRasfenoni commander was horrified, at the loss of ships, at the waste of ordnance he needed to score hits with, passed two orders; open formation, deploy fighters.

They got the first part right - narrow beam the order to an accompanying ship to broadcast, avoid giving the flag's identity away. Unfortunately, they did make a major mistake.

The flood of datasharing between the ships of the force was already switched into war operating mode - the burst transmission was not. Most of the time, it would have gone unnoticed, but the sheer size of the dreadnought meant a larger passive sensor area - Tichy's ESM was good enough to pick it up and distinguish it.

The rRasfenoni flagship was the left-hand Providence. "Ions, take it." The dreadnought's heavy ion cannon separated themselves out of the wall of fire and lashed out at the rebel flag. The weight of fire was too much for the large light destroyer; it twisted, kicked as the drives fired at random, the lights went out and there were marks like fulgurites left over the ship's bow.

Tichy could do nothing about it himself - boarding shuttles didn't have that kind of acceleration either, and there was an entirely different term for what happened when somebody tried to dock to a ship with a hundred and fifty thousand kps difference in velocity.

The reinforcements - the pair of approaching battlecruisers - would have to deal with that; they were moving at a close enough relative speed to deploy assault craft.

The rRasfenoni ships were spewing fighters now; swim-out launch bays for the most part, faster to deploy but more prone to accident. The extra warheads they could launch would make little odds, but they and the debris would be a significant collision hazard, as would the 'killed' hulks and the fragments blown off them.

The simple fact of the rRasfenoni being there was the most dangerous thing they could have done, their best chance to inflict real damage in the Imperial Starfleet. If Convarrian could keep them in a state of fear, keep them thinking 'oh my alien gods, we've been jumped, they've come to get us' - rather than actually running the possibilities - they might get through this without taking too many hits and too many holes ripped in the hull.

Paralysing the flagship was essential, but sheer chaos was almost equally likely to serve them.

What could the Imperials do to manage the situation - would frightening them into scattering make any material difference - probably, yes.

Convarrian snapped out his orders as fast as he could mouth the words and still be understood. "Those three-" dot, dot, dot; the w-165 carriers - "then centre of formation, push them out and make a hole. We flip two seconds early, flank thrust," not to slow the ship down by any meaningful amount, but to put out enough of an ion flare to melt or push away most of the lighter debris, "raise tow shields and take the hits there then form the drogue."

All of which was sound enough, and none of it was properly the job of an admiral. Convarrian took an active, day to day role in the running of his flagship, and Force help any flag captain who got in his way.

That was twenty seconds away. Gunnery knew better than to protest, although the point defence turret-group commanders were already screaming at the type-commander about being masked and unable to do their job. Unfortunately, that was the risk the Admiral had decided to take and theirs to make the best of it.

Convarrian himself did have second thoughts; one second of ion flare ought to be enough, give the point defence fit a little more tie to work with, but to countermand the order he had just given would do nothing but spread confusion.

Launching fighters would be another wasted errand. They would add to the ship's defence a little, but between blast flares off shielding, warhead explosions and random junk, the losses they would take would be well out of proportion to the good they could do. They would want to fight, want to take their chances out there - but the odds were against them. They would have their moment later, when Tichy had time to decelerate to any kind of reasonable speed.

There was a bright green flash up ahead in the centre of the rRasfenoni formation, a small nova with three rapid sequels - one of the heavy batteries had decided to rig for and fire a burst of flak fire at the swarm of missiles, the burst blasted a huge hole in the wall of shot detonating many and leaving the rest, the inert kinetics, glowing brightly enough to be easy point defence targets.

"Find out who did that and commend them; I should have thought of that," Convarrian snapped, tone so annoyed that it took Tichy's gunnery officer a couple of seconds of thought to pick up on the words. The battery - forward dorsal centreline - fired another four at the thickest surviving concentrations, blasting more holes in the missile and fighter swarm, and then going back to conventional heavy fire.

The admiral glanced at the ship status display; a few red punctures where the w-165s had sent enough power leaking through to do damage, two deeper cones of compromised hull where the kinetics had hit, and three patches like a rash where a face of shielding had temporarily overloaded under mass fire from the destroyers and frigates and let many minor hits through.

The armed merchants did have some firepower after all, and -  
One of them was manoeuvring differently from the rest, not even making an attempt at independent footwork, certainly pulling out of formation; Tichy's navigator looked at the flaring halo around the ship on his own display - how was that facility active? - "He's going to try a transition ram." Accelerate to hyperspace, and hope to hit the enemy on the way - hit an enemy actually as you were in the act of rotating across the light barrier, and the numbers got very weird, but the odds of survival - of either party - very small.  
It was a good risk for them to take, especially as the natural reaction for a ship as big and slow-turning as a dreadnought was to bring the alpha arc to bear and try to kill it with fire rather than evade.

"Bow up, roll starboard to inverted," the admiral ordered; he was micro-managing, knew it, and had no intention of stopping. Bringing alpha on was just too straightforward - and the rRasfenoni fleet dropped a coherent converged salvo exactly where they would have expected him to be if he had reacted in the usual manner. A pre-arranged plan activated by a junior flag officer? Probably, but whoever they were, they were smart enough not to give it away this time. One of the destroyers, no doubt. Few clues from formation.

Tichy's guns were still tracking onto the ramship, which was adjusting course to meet them. Executor had survived a similar impact, although from a lower tonnage ship, and also crucially while Executor had been in the later stages of a downward transition herself, hyper and stasis fields still partially active as she cycled down to normal space.

Although a tragedy in its own right - a collision with a friendly ship - the incident had instantly become politicised, supporters of the new class using it to argue that previous doubts about the survivability of the highly offensively oriented type were unfounded.  
Convarrian was not one of those supporters. He doubted whether an Executor-class ship fully in normal space could survive that kind of punishment; wasn't too sanguine about a Mandator's chances either.

The armed heavy freighter about to rush at them was just the right ship for the job, too - heavy, lots of impact, hard to kill. Unless -

"Guns, no. Don't waste the lasers, as soon as it gets a stable vector put a full missile volley down the throat," Convarrian ordered producing another boggle moment, his flag captain - might as well be a Mon Cal, considering how much he looks like a gaffed fish most of the time, Convarrian thought - was about to protest, before the admiral forestalled him. "If they hold back until we turn, missile them anyway."

Tichy hadn't been conserving ammunition, simply not bothering to pop off any more than the situation warranted. The rRasfenoni had been blasting off warheads wholesale trying to empty their payload bays, and a fine assortment it was too.

They had led with their best, protons, most of which had been burnt up by flak bursts and other ships detonating. Half the total were concussions, and the rest a mix of very old style plasma and fusion heads - useful four thousand years ago, maybe, but not now.

It seemed ridiculous to think of something lasting only thirty seconds as having a mid game, but it did - the phase after the initial surprise, where the Rasfenoni tried to manoeuvre Tichy into their trap - and argued among themselves over who was going to receive the terminal honour of being the trap - and Tichy simply tried to cull enough of them fast enough to get through without taking too many hits.

The dreadnought could not power all his weapons at once off the reactor, but there was more than enough power left in the capacitors to last this out, and absolutely no reason not to remain on maximum fire.

Which strategy? Slaughter the smaller craft? Made sense, but it was too tricky to achieve in practise. At two seconds - push a cone of fire around the target, narrow in on them, kill and move on - to deal with each of eighty frigates, dancing and weaving and avoiding fire - there simply was not enough time.  
Scatter fire was also futile; space was too big. Aimed shot to cripple, fire control switching targets like a plate- spinner, trying to hit each of them hard enough to prevent them manoeuvring to intercept.

It was too obvious, Convarrian cursed. Attempting to drill a clear corridor through the debris simply made their line of attack that much more evident, made a last second suicide run much easer to plan.

The alternative was to leave the space before them uncleared - and the manoeuvre cone was narrowing - which might come to the same thing anyway. The renegade aliens hadn't broken and run, they were keeping formation, and the space in front of the Imperial ship was choked with debris and potential doom.

The last time anyone had been stupid enough to lose a dreadnought - it had been during the Outer Rim Sieges, a relief force had reduced RSS Resolution to a constructive total loss, but they hadn't saved the planet. It had been a pyrrhic victory for the Separatists, the occasion that confirmed the estimate of needing a thousand Recusant light destroyers to stand up against a Mandator. By that standard, the rRasfenoni were doing well. If they got their impact.

The endgame began when the ramship made its move, Tichy eight seconds out. It accelerated up to lightspeed - and the dreadnought made a full power sideslip away and spat out a cloud of heavy missiles.  
The ramship couldn't have been expecting anything of the sort, thought that was it; took the heavy bombardment heads, detonated, a flurry of fireballs that reduced the armed freighter to vapour- which kept moving, a confused billow of plasma that mostly missed the ducking dreadnought, searing the shields but not enough to burn through.

Eight seconds, twenty-five kilometres per second per second; eight hundred kilometre wide manoeuvre envelope and shrinking fast, some of it already ruled out by the planet- the rRasfenoni had tried to herd the dreadnought into a vector that would result in a powerdive into the planetary shields, Tichy had slid out again and again, taking hits to do so but evading the greater danger.

The rRasfenoni armada, torn and reduced, clustered towards the contracting circle. Space was big, the odds were in Tichy's favour - barring the possibility of intelligent interception.

Three more frigates manoeuvring for a ram attempt. Each odd numbered gun fired into one, each even numbered gun into the other, time on target volleys to kill and hopefully vapourise - one fully and one partially successful, a cloud of gas and a broken- backed skeleton of a ship.

The third started to accelerate, and Convarrian couldn't think of anything to do - the gun cycle time was too long, they had a few tenths of a second - then the ship violently heeled round, main engines flaring on overload, and the helmsman and the navigator behind him were looking at the board in stunned horror.

Not supposed to happen. Not what they had meant. The big ship kicked to one side, but if they were still alive to feel it, and Convarrian didn't think he had been reduced to a cloud of vapour although his bowels were disagreeing with that assessment, it hadn't hit.  
Free and clear out in hyperspace, it had escaped, but it hadn't hit. Helm looked utterly confounded as he worked the controls, making sure everything responded. That shouldn't have happened, unless the ship really did have a mind of his own.

Further fire was irrelevant from the rRasfenoni; the dreadnought wasn't nearly damaged enough for what very little more they could do to matter. All they could hope for now were the warheads.

Tichy had fired a mere three volleys, two on semi-active homing, choosing targets from what the parent ship's scanners could give them, and one defensive, simply going to detonate in a wall of blast intended to keep off the rRasfenoni missiles.

The third volley detonated first as the rRasfenoni missiles started to reach it. A curtain of fireballs that Tichy lanced through a moment later, trailing a thermonuclear-and-worse cloak behind him.  
Substantial but not complete success; and whether it was a failure of targeting or a failure of imagination, the rRasfenoni failed to do the same. Their warheads were aimed to hit, not to protect.

They scored a few, concussions, fusion and plasma mostly, little more than warming up the shields. Defensive fire slashed out from the alien force.

Tichy's missiles had tried a pin and pierce; half the strike spread itself evenly, tie down point defence, prevent mutual support and take advantage of any mistakes, the other half had focused in on a handful of targets, to overwhelm.

The last of the w-165 carriers took eight strategic warheads, massive flares of light and heat that reduced it to a spray of molten droplets moving almost as fast as Tichy, the multi-petaton blasts clearing out a huge void in the enemy battle formation.

"Now," Convarrian ordered, "execute flip." Helm tried - and nothing happened. Stabbing frantically at the buttons and heaving on the yoke, and trying not to scream. Nav did it for him. "Major malfunction, we are not under command, the electronics-"

Tichy moved, up and over, but the portside main engine fired, overload thrust, then the rest joined it turning a simple end for end into a wild, swooping corkscrew through the incandescent cloud of the last major weapon carrier. Bow first, instead of stern on; and the ship's ion wake washed across and detonated the mines that had been waiting for them.

"Helm, does he answer?" Convarrian snapped.

"No…yes."

"Execute flip manoeuvre, and form the drogue." Convarrian refused to consider the incident further now. The only reasonable conclusion was either that some remnants of illegal AI survived in the maze of legacy systems and incremental improvements that made up the veteran warship's stone-soup computer system...or that the ghost of the Cosmonaut still lingered somewhere around the ship that carried his name. Hard to say which possibility was more worrying. Or, given some of the incidents that had befallen the great explorer in his long and strange career, more likely.

They could have kept firing against the rRasfenoni fleet, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble, especially as two curlings of space, then two bright white flashes, announced the arrival of Immiserator and Invigilator, the pair of Praetor-class battlecruisers that had been redirected to support Goshawk.

The battle carrier was ordered to duck and cover - head for the lower atmosphere as Tichy swept by - as Immiserator moved to finish what was left of the rRasfenoni mobile force, and Invigilator to follow Tichy in.

There was barely time to blink; gunnery did well getting any kind of fire plan together at all, even if it was only 'watch your sectors and hit targets of opportunity'.

Convarrian had more than half expected the rRasfenoni to drop their shields to avoid Tichy scraping a hole in them, flicker them too fast for Goshawk to do anything meaningful; they started to, too late.

Raw power wasn't the issue. Warship shields could work with the ship's own hull and the mesh of forcefields that permeated it anyway, planetary shields didn't have that option. They had to raise an artificial surface, a projected bubble to work off of - and most people mistook that artificial surface for the shield, when it was really the thermal absorption gear that made up the defensive system, the force wall just an essential prerequisite, admittedly with some kinetic use. Breaker torpedoes worked by trying to avoid attacking the shield as such, instead scattering particles through the force wall shredding it's integrity.

Tichy's towing shield was a force wall type, and the plan was to use it to carve a hole in the planetary shield. The rRasfenoni's attempt to flicker it couldn't have come at a better time - it made the planet's shield wall weak enough to cleave.

The two force walls met in an atomic storm that would have sparked uncontrollable drooling among any physicists who had the good fortune to be present and not threatened, tearing a glowing line across the planet, the edges melting and peeling back.

Tichy could spare only a handful of shot, nailed one of the orbital shield generators, but Goshawk was right there.

Part of the shield bubble whiplashed across the battle carrier as it unravelled, scarring and melting surface features but not enough, not nearly enough to stop them unloading on every planetary-surface generator they could reach.

The collapsing shield bubble did an excellent job of clearing the air around the battle carrier. Goshawk couldn't have managed that effective a point defence sweep in ten years of fire. Her own were forewarned, ducked back behind the parent ship - some lost, not many, not too high a price for what happened.

The planetary defences were laid wide open, and the conquest of the septacular aliens' major fleet base could begin.

Tichy drifted outwards, the crew beginning damage control and starting to decelerate down to a reasonable operational speed, and Convarrian took the time, at last, to take stock of the situation throughout the rest of the group.

The sketchy earlier reports were true. Two from the 851st fleet destroyer squadron; their flag officer had indeed jumped, ionised and taken the sector group flagship, and arrested the Moff.

The detached element that had started the whole business, had apparently - that couldn't be right. Indicted and executed- no mention of a trial, no procedure - a special assistant - assassin, Convarrian substituted - to the Privy Council?

How - and in the seventeen lesser known half circles of hell, why? Oh, and taken a major Rebel base. Destroyermen, Convarrian grunted. Always doing something dangerously crazy.


	46. Chapter 46

Mirannon had a fairly clear idea of what was going on, and chose not to enter by the obvious route. One of the advantages of being intimately familiar with the bowels of the ship. Disable two field generators and restart them behind him, wriggle through a duct he didn't remember being quite that narrow. Unseal a sealed off hatch, scramble through the junk of broken medical gear in the closed off half-room - after this what was waiting for him ought to be easy. He did have to slice through one panel, carefully welded it up again behind him - no point getting into sloppy habits now. Disconnect, not destroy, the internal security alarms, and arrive in a janitorial closet adjacent to the medical reception hall.

Dramatic entrance time, the engineer decided. A flash of the cutting torch sliced through the hinges, then he kicked the door open - a door, not a hatch. A reinforced hatch in a load bearing bulkhead, part of the ship's armour scheme, would have laughed at him. This one smashed open properly.

The hall was a mess. Patients' litters everywhere, some open and part way through treatment, a handful of walking wounded, and medics and damage control personnel standing around in mid-crisis.

Backed up against reception, wedged in a corner, were the two twi'lek. One - the female, Reni - had a laser scalpel in each hand and another pair being wielded in her head tentacles; the male had a blaster pistol stolen from one of the damage control team, and a mechanical replacement for his missing lekku...wrapped around the chief medical officer's throat.  
Two wounded men who had tried to play hero and pieces of two dismembered medical droids lay scattered on the deck near them, which was some explanation for the blood and oil that was covering Blei-Korberkk's scrubs.

'Nice of you to drop by,' she managed to say, struggling against the mad-eyed twi'lek.

'See what you get for letting people play with robot tentacles?' Mirannon said, taking a leaf out of his captain's book - saying something normal, verging on absurd in context, to push the other side off balance and give him more time to think.

He had enough support, enough other people, but none of them ground fighters. The twi'lek, however submissive they might have been to Kor Alric, were crazy enough to make it a real risk.

'We want a shuttle. Get us a shuttle,' the male twi'lek said, from his position almost hidden behind the surgeon.

'The nearest open space is five light and two armoured decks, and the other side of the main hull, that way,' Mirannon said, gesturing upwards with the cutting torch blade. 'Did you have a plan 'b'?'

'Transport, or she dies. Slowly,' Igal said, tightening the tentacle.

'Zubaide?' Mirannon asked the surgeon-lieutenant commander.

'Yes?' she gurgled.

'In situations like this, the hostage is usually considered officially expendable, aren't you?' he said, trying to make it sound to everyone except her that he actually meant it.

'You're scaring me now,' she managed to say.

'I should kriffing well hope so - you don't think anyone significantly less scary than they are could get you out of this, do you?' Mirannon deadpanned, twitching his blade slightly as if sizing up the female for dissection.

'All you have is a sword,' the female twi'lek said.

'You have scalpels. You think four little blades add up to one big one?' Mirannon said, relieved that they hadn't noticed the com/remote control hidden in his other hand, that he was furiously, and hopefully accurately, pressing buttons on.

'Put it down,' the male said.

'Come and make me. You know I can have you diced and fried before you leave as much as a bruise,' Mirannon said, sidestepping to put the female on a line between him and the male.

Steered to perfection. Reni stepped forwards into the attack, Igal shot at him, and a tight cone of ray shielding came down from the deckhead and engulfed her, the blaster bolt ricocheting off it.

'Hm. Hostage for hostage,' Igal demanded.

'I don't think so,' Mirannon said, activating phase two of the plan. Reni had barely more than the beginning of a scream as the ship's relative-inertials locked on to the body inside the shield envelope, and accelerated it radially, away from its centre of mass. She splashed across the inside of the ray shielding like a tentacle-headed strawberry in a blender.

Igal reacted poorly; he screamed in bafflement, fear and rage - which was all the opening Mirannon needed to take two long steps past the cone of ray shielding and lunge. He stabbed the twi'lek in the side of his head, against the base of the cybertentacle, shearing through that and curving his blade inward as he followed through, burning his way through the twi'lek's brain and the back of his skull.

Three down. Adanan is going to be furious, the engineer thought, then sniffed the 'air'- distinctly cleaner, the display team must have got him. And I do have one definable Force power, he thought; scent scumbag. Damn.

The twi'lek crumpled to the ground, half-dragging Blei-Korberkk down with him until she could unwind the tentacle, then staggered back to her feet, smiled faintly, and collapsed over him - theatrically and with forethought, the engineer thought.

Looks like Operation Frothing Nutcase didn't work; she must be attracted to the bloodthirsty type. Still, he thought, looking at the woman draped over him trying to pretend that she was semiconscious and grope him at the same time, could be worse.

The defenders of Admonisher knew, if they were prepared to admit it to themselves, that there was nothing more they could usefully do. Even if they could beat the boarders back and regain control, the Empire would just ionise them and do it all again.

In imperial service, these ships carried a standard crew of fifty-two thousand. The Alliance lean-manned anyway and they had a reduced crew even by those standards, twenty thousand. Roughly fourteen thousand had survived in sufficient state to fight, most of them wounded to some degree - usually electrical burns from ion hits or thermal burns from the amount of heat the turbolasers had dumped into the ship. Another five thousand, a positive abundance by Alliance standards, knew enough soldiering to take up a blaster out of choice rather than necessity - many of those were already gone too, killed by naval gunfire or in the fighting around the bay.  
The largest and most strategically valuable human component, the eighty thousand yard workers who had been crammed on board, had suffered too - maybe fifty-five thousand still fit to fight.

Of the thirty-five thousand Imperial soldiers about to pile in on them, twenty thousand were Stormtroopers, fifteen thousand were lesser breeds of maniac. Against four thousand semi-professionals and sixty thousand amateurs, the only thing that could stop them was if they got carried away to the point where they lost their wits and started believing there was nothing that could stop them.

They knew better than that. Pretend to be that stupidly overconfident for the benefit of the rebels, maybe, but the fact was rebel command seemed to be point and shout, it had broken down at the operational level. No large scale deceptions were likely to be necessary, and the existing plan was going well. Not perfectly, but enough. Giving the spacetroopers the bay to attack, with room to manoeuvre and play to their strengths - the idea was that the rebs would be drawn forward to meet them, into a fight with all the advantages in the attackers' favour.

In practise, they had gone through the rebs' forward defence line before it could be properly organised, and were hammering on a half manned main line of resistance; the first two stormtrooper regiments were now on board - First through the wreckage where the neck of the bridge tower had been, and then heading forwards through the superstructure towards the medical bay, that ready-made supply of rebel prisoners.

It was Second's turn for the prime objective: they got to enter the crater where one of the batteries had been blasted away and move down to Engineering from there. They met light resistance immediately, crew with blaster pistols, some who had managed to get to the armoury - the spacetroopers were securing that, and pillaging what they could as they went, restocking minitorps and grenades - and were using heavy blaster rifles.

Even those who had the tools to fight back with didn't have the talent. They didn't know what risks were worth taking, made poor use of space - they would keep defending companionway junctions at the junction itself, and defended everything, regardless of how practical it was.

Kill all the other side, and the ground becomes yours by default. Paradoxically, operations in this most confined form of warfare became dependent on the same rule as open space - the units more important than the terrain. The actual machinery of the ship and its control centres mattered, of course, but there were so many chokepoints between here and there, holding bad ground was not worth it, and too often the rebels tried to hold bad ground. They also had little clue when it came to blowing through bulkheads, rolling thermal detonators along air vents, gas attacks, pre-emptive environment sabotage - not that there was anything wrong with their ignorance from the Imperial point of view.

'Too easy' was the sort of thing Imperial Stormtroopers were expected to say, and some of them did, but nobody actually meant it.

Except possibly Aleph-3. She desperately wanted something to take her mind off her other problems, of which there were many. An endless shooting gallery of rebels with compatible ammo to scavenge and not enough sense to keep out of the way suited her temper perfectly. She was behaving like a berserker, charging ahead, following close behind her own grenades, throwing a charge one way and moving the other immediately after - caught in the fringes of her own explosions as often as not.

The first time she tried it it was wonderful - blast waves rippling into her like a giant hand, three stunned rebels, blasted away - failed to notice, or if she noticed failed to care, how much it scared her team mates. They could tell, knew her well enough to realise she was trying to get herself killed.

Aleph-One couldn't take it any more. Captain in the special forces, twenty-five year veteran, and he was letting this happen? 'Team Beth, Team Gimel, switch to stun, target Aleph-3, five rounds rapid-'

She turned round - drill taking over, lowering her gun automatically in line with a friendly target, although that was debatable. 'What?'

'You've lost it. We can shoot you, the followup wave'll collect you and put you in the brig, or I can let you keep going until one of the rebs you didn't see puts you in the morgue. Calm. Focus. Get back in formation - we have a job to do.'

'That,' she said, letting herself stand still for a moment, the adrenalin drain away for a little and the cold sweat of realisation - of how dangerously stupid she had been - flood over her body, 'may be the nicest thing you've ever said to me.'

'Yes, well, somebody's got to do it,' he said, embarrassed.

'Where do we go from here?' she asked, and there were definitely two questions in that. Metaphorically, who knew? Literally, left, access well, down from there.

The second regiment - that most of the special ops and independent batallions had attached themselves to - was thrashing its way through the alliance irregulars, making good time. Parties of Alliance troops would hold ground and find themselves bypassed and shot up from three sides; went forward to retake chambers and junctions already lost, into Imperial counterambushes.

There was a major access shaft that had turned into a focal point of the battle; everyone the rebel engineering team could spare from trying to vent off the ionic effects were here, and the Imperial attack converged on them.

Bolts flashed up and down the shaft, a minitorp was launched, caught in the crossfire and detonated midway down, flash- burning as many stormtroopers as rebels; the column of rising air made it difficult to drop gas grenades - the vapour rose.

It was straightforward blaster work, and there were enough rebels putting enough light into the air to make things difficult; exactly the sort of situation Stormtroopers were supposed to deal with.

Aleph-One was having something of a crisis of conscience. 'Men, troopers, logic check. We're the only force wearing anything other than plain white. We stick out massively, an obvious target. When the force ups and charges, we are going to take much more than our fair share of the blaster bolts and probably get killed.'

'Sounds logical to me,' Beth-1 admitted. 'How do we get from there to a plan?'

'We kick off first,' Aleph-One decided, 'a second before the rest, and we run and dodge like bastards - or like clones - draw as much fire on to ourselves as possible, draw the rebs out to deal with us and let the regiment kill them.'

'Ah, volunteering us for the forlorn hope? That fits,' Aleph-3 said, popping up, firing a burst and ducking back. No doubt, no questioning at all. This was what stormtroopers were for, this was the point of existence. 'Regiment?'

'The bridge are screaming blue murder, but legion command says go,' Aleph-One decided. It was something like flying, loose on the winds of probability; maybe live, likely die, your own decision and your own input - it was as close as any of the first generation clone troopers got to being in command of their fates.  
Natural born humans, and many aliens, were said to undergo something similar - existentialism to the point of willingly measuring yourself against an existential threat. Throwing yourself at the risk to see if you had what it took to live. Madness, maybe, but an interesting psychological kink, becoming addicted to an experience that you could only really achieve through your job, and which was overwhelmingly likely to get you eventually.

One of the reasons Aleph-3's defection risk was rated at zero: she could, would, only respond emotionally to someone who could feed her addiction, so she could be safely allowed to play with the civilians, she would never really attach herself to any of them.  
There was more than one man like that in her life, she was starting to realise, about a second before she got killed.

'Right,' Aleph-One nerved himself for it, then started to stand, 'up, clones, and at them-'

There was a brilliant green flash, and all of them wondered if that was them dead, if the blinding light had actually been the end of the tunnel; then the anti-glare started to retrieve their vision, and at the bottom of the drop shaft, they could see stars.

Slightly closer to, burnt-through decking ending in a thick armoured slab blast - melted open to space, and just past that the shovel noses of two Starwing-series assault gunboats. When the target vessel is already pretty badly beaten up, there's not much more harm that can be done by blasting through layers of the hull to fire in close support.

'We're alive?' Aleph-3 said to her squad leader.

'We're not dead yet, and there's more to do. Come on; after nerving up for that, I'd hate to be last in.'

One minor matter still to be dealt with. 'Dr Nygma?' Lennart asked one of the consoles.

'No, over here.'

'And here.'

'What about me over here?'

Half a dozen startled pit operators reached for half a dozen hard reset buttons. Lennart waved for them to stop.

'Have you got back in touch with the Ubiqtorate yet? Actually, make that the collective you.'

'Yes. We have,' Nygma said, and sounded scared. All fifteen of him present.

'Multiple copies of yourself got in touch with them, and they have the brain and computer power to figure out what you've done,' Lennart said. 'How did they take it?'

'Not well,' Nygma admitted. 'A long and highly theoretical set of negotiations. Not helped by the fact that I'm barking mad and proud of it, do you hear me, proud!' he said, obviously lying.

'So - you tried to get them intrigued enough to reel you in to whatever facilities they have for cryptanalytical research? There can't be very many computer systems with enough room for a full digital download to expand, end even fewer with so much room that you can hide. Coruscant would seem to be a good place for that.  
'You couldn't possibly convince them that you weren't a threat. What's being a purely information based lifeform like?' Lennart asked, out of interest. It might be a good career move, the way things were going.

'Like being born again. Including all that yucky bit with the placenta and learning how to walk, see and go potty. In both senses of the term, I mean, computers have this annoying habit of being exact,' the Doctor said.

'Ah,' Lennart said.

'The mistakes, the frozen moments, the feedback loops are just awful. It's a totally different sense of self, it's wonderful, I should have done it years ago,' Dr Nygma said, and Lennart wondered who he was fooling, himself or the human.

'Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it, but can you make a future out of it? And- have you, as it were, borne witness?' Lennart asked.

'Oh, yes, them. Well, they asked, and I spun them a pack of ultraviolet lies, with light overtones of pastel blue. Unfortunately, I, that's the collective-we version of the perpendicular pronoun, the yes that the self affirms to, I tried setting them all to take a thirteen and a quarter degree angle but it didn't quite work, crashed terribly in fact. Where was I?' Nygma lost his train of thought.

'One and zero; god and the void; affirmation and annihilation; the matrix of pattern, the balance of tension. That's where you were; where you should have been was telling more of how things went with the Ubiqtorate,' Lennart pointed out.

'Ah. Well, they got about ten different versions of the story. I will be most interested in seeing how they syncretise it all, there should be more than enough room for their own prejudices and prejudgements to come to the fore.  
'They do say that in a coat of many colours, every man finds his own thread. Provided they're not all shades of grey. Or puce, I always liked the idea of puce. Fascinating how the idea of a colour can be different from the reality, and the idea of an idea which is what the Ubiqtorate deal in as often as not, and the multigenerational collective mind of cryptography, how the bastion of muddy power is also the first home of pure reason…oh, ideas, ideas falling over each other.'

'So you would say,' Lennart said, watching the main holodisplay showing an approximation of the fighting on Admonisher, rebel held areas shrinking nearly to nothing and imperial held areas growing, 'that being an electronic intelligence is an interesting adventure in personal growth? Or personal diminution if they take offence at the mound of quasi-information you fed them.'

'I have decided that the laws of physics are the only laws worth obeying, and all information is important to the laws of physics, but only a small amount meaningful to the laws of men and similar protoplasmic creatures which is proof of their inferiority,' Nygma said, apropos of nothing, apparently.

'So they did take offence,' Lennart more than half guessed. 'That mustn't have made you popular, especially if you actually said that or left them enough spoor that they could deduce it. Or, by extension, me.'

'Popularity is for celebrities and beauty contestants, although if there was a contest for the most intricately nested set of logical operators and the most elegant self programming…Holy Turing, no, the publicity,' Nygma said. 'Although it is fascinating to contemplate the mind space smart enough to win and stupid enough to think it a good idea. No, they were moderately appreciative.'

'Did they make you an offer?' Lennart asked.

'Well, yes, but a guarded one, not suitable for all of me, not by any means. I think I shall diasporise myself.'

'That sounds painful. And yes, I do mean the consequences.'

'What's the point of being a plurality if I don't allow myselves to develop irreconcilable opinions of my own?' Nygma said.

'An interesting new spectrum of pronouns is going to be the least of your problems,' Lennart reminded him.

'If I'm reading that correctly, you've just promised to be on about five different sides. I should probably arrest you for intent to defect, but frankly I don't think the internal network team have quite finished figuring out how. We are about to go in for refit, though, and chances are that'll include some fairly extensive computer scrubbing - you'd be as well to get out now, while you have the chance.'

'Yes, I have plans. I'll need to conglomerate from time to time just to find out what I've been up to, though…I did think of meeting up again here, but you don't really have the room. Tichy was full,' Nygma said, sounding surprised.

'I did find a very interesting option while I was in Coruscant, though; a vigilante with an off the books computer system, more processing power than he could ever need, or notice the difference of me in - some noble blooded would be hero of the streets who calls himself MynockMan. Very strange, but eminently exploitable; if you ever manage to find the MynockCave, look me up.'

The fighting was done, for the time being, and there were three repair tenders and part of a deepdock already in system; the debris was starting to settle on the planet and put out some of the fires, apart from the occasional dust explosion.

'Well, for those of you who survived…' Lennart said, looking around the table, 'this is victory. There's always someone who isn't here to share it with you, and there's always a kriffing great mess to be cleaned up,' Lennart said, wondering if he was deliberately bringing himself down.

The Force wanted him to cry out in triumph, but he was far from sure the Force shared his sense of values. Half the captains of the squadron, looking at him, were sure they had done something wrong; why else would be in such a grim and glowering mood? The rest resented that - they knew how well they had done. Good.

'For what it's worth, there have only been twenty-eight confirmed Alliance cruiser class ships encountered.' A fine splitting of hairs there, glossing over the much larger number of Imperial-renegade and local power ships the Starfleet found to shoot at. 'Three were defector Imperial, four were Mon Cal homebuilt, two were other construction - one CorelliSpace, one modified Kuat freighter-to-AMC, the rest were Clone War relics. By any reasonable military standard, we won,' he said, making them wonder whether or not his really was a reasonable military standard.

'Because of the peculiar interpretation of our unit assignment which you share, the old bonus and bounty rules still apply. By any reasonable financial standard, you are all substantially better off.'

The credit value of the planet and its workshops and factories, albeit reduced a little by rebel stripping, two killed destroyers, one medium cruiser and the capture and return - eventually - to the fleet of Admonisher, the total ran into the low trillions. Captain's shares would be in the millions, at least. Lennart found that he, personally, did not care; although he refused to let the Force stop him from taking note of who did.

'On the other hand,' he continued, 'the cost - and not to the Empire. The Empire got half a planet and a fleet destroyer back, and flushed a large number of parasites out. Black Sun, on the other hand, we just managed to cost them several trillion credits in assets and future profits, and at least a hundred trillion in goodwill and toadying.  
'Xizor just had to offer the boss free use of his haulage firm, a no-cost tender, to buy his way out of the execution booth. Not that we really had anything beyond coincidence and suspicion; the fact that they reacted so strongly, I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions.  
'So, you can see why some of my take from this operation is going towards hiring bodyguards for everybody I've ever met.'

There was a minor issue there, relating back to Adannan; do I hire sponsored loyalist legitimate-mercenary types (insofar as that makes sense at all) to protect me from the criminals, he thought, or do I hire criminals to protect myself from the Empire? Actually, that probably would be a good move, make it more than a joke - send everyone I can think of a couple of thousand credits along with a letter of explanation. Of half of it, at least. Hide behind the armour of publicity - and oh kriff, there are still the journalists to sort out.

He carried on anyway, spun up the holoprojector. 'Bear that in mind as I explain the next part, will you?' The first thing up was the sector map, and a new set of operational divisions and boundaries.  
'Vineland Sector Group is going to be disestablished, and folded into Region for reorganisation and refit. There's a lot to do; seven major and we don't know yet how many minor sieges, and rebel, criminal and hostile alien influence to be traced and eliminated throughout the sector. For political reasons, the rebuilt sector fleet is going to get to do most of the work. It'll consist largely of a mix of new construction, transfers in from neighbouring sectors, and such elements of the existing force that survive the screening process, which is where you come in.'

'I was asked for my recommendations as to what to do with you all.' The assembled officers' ears perked up; Lennart had been pretty distant so far, but this was the meat of it all. This was their futures he was handing out.  
That occurred to him, and he thought, if I was on the receiving end, what sort of person would I want to do this, dispose of my fate? In theory - and in practise it would be daft to admit otherwise - it was good to want to be judged honestly, without fear or favour. In practise, no.  
'It was an interesting process judging the political climate so I could decide how to spin it, ricochet the recommendations off the Admiral's staff and the remnants of the civil administration to get for you the outcomes I think you deserve.  
'Space Major Overgaard, I used you as the test case. I expected your superiors to violently disagree with me and oppose my decision - so I suggested that you be shot.'

Overgaard looked nervously at the stormtroopers in attendance in the conference room. All this metal, and the glandular system still lets me panic, he thought. They showed no sign of being about to open up on him - then again, they wouldn't, not until the last split second. 'Now, without appeal? They agreed?'

'They're sufficiently embarrassed by the rerouting fiasco that they gladly took any excuse to dispose of the evidence. They wanted you dead,' Lennart said, trying to look unaffected. 'Unfortunately for them, being caught trying to bury one of their own cockups made them eminently purgeable - I understand those who survived their arrest are explaining themselves to a marine interrogation team about now.  
'You're safe, but your colleagues'll never like you for that, and I strongly recommend you transfer out of the ISB into some other, cleaner-handed branch of the Imperial service.'

Overgaard sank back in his chair in relief. Lennart was right, he would be the most unpopular man in the office after this, and his career in Security was more or less dead, even if he wasn't. Perhaps Customs would be more fun. Maybe CompForce.

'Lieutenant-Commander Rontaine.' Lennart said, turning to look at the ex-customs officer.

'Naval rank?' she said, surprised. It was no more than she had been due, but she had given up hoping - had defiantly turned her back on it years ago. 'Thank you, but no. They-'

'Previous bad blood is unimportant now. The only reason I'll accept for 'no' is that you don't think you can do the job - and are you really sure you want to convince me of that?' Lennart asked her. 'Rank and seniority adjusted to the role I think you can cope with, you're going to be given a pursuit line composed of two hunter configuration Corellian Corvettes, two new Praecurrors, your current four Rendilis and four Sienar Guardian fast pursuit cutters. Anti-rebel sweeps, fighter and transport hunting. Of which there is a lot that needs doing. Hmm?'

She still looked uncertain. Wondering how things would go, how the fleet would take to her, personnel, leadership- and decided, damn them all. She was capable, and while she might make few friends, she could get it done. 'I'll do it.'

'Good,' Lennart said, and turned to the next major problem in order of seniority. 'Lieutenant-Commander Raesene.'

'Ah., Raesene said, not at all liking Lennart's twisted grin.

'I have thought long and hard about whether I am being fair to you with this,' Lennart said, trying to resist the tickling promptings of the dark side, 'and while this could easily be mistaken for petty revenge, unfortunately your part in the incident genuinely does make you the best person for the job. Fleet level ISB liaison.'

Raesene tried not to react, and was sure he failed. He was also fairly sure that calling a superior officer a bastard - and Lennart still had the rank squares of a Captain of the Line - was not a survival strategy.

'They'll hate me for what happened,' he came up with the most rational argument he could, dry mouthed. 'I mean, fine me, disrate me, I don't need to be taught that kind of lesson.'

'How solid do you think your reputation with the rest of the fleet is at the moment?' Lennart asked, pointedly. 'Oh, you'll get a commendation for towing Guillemot, and you are a capable - more than capable - combat officer, but there is a lot more infighting about to happen. From the point of view of protecting the rest of the sector fleet and preventing the security forces compromising anybody else, I can't think of anyone who would be better. I expect you'll hate it, but the fact is somebody's got to do it, and the staff time should do your long term prospects some good,' Lennart added, and noticed Raesene was still glowering.  
'You can appeal to Admiral Lord Convarrian if you like, and if you do reckon this is personal, bear in mind that I'm not Convarrian's favourite person at the moment considering how much politics I've just landed him in. If I really am being unfairly vindictive about this, he'll notice and override the recommendation. On the other hand, he can be a cantankerous old sod himself, and is just as likely to decide you're trying to escape your just desserts and make the appointment permanent.' Black Prince's officers nodded agreement to that. 'As it is, you'll be relieved on the normal rotation,' Lennart added.

'Lieutenant-Commander Caliphant. In theory, you're far too junior for a ship that size, you don't have anything like the command time to justify giving you a destroyer. However, this is wartime, and among the many casualties of war is peacetime theorising. You're confirmed as chief officer of Voracious.' Caliphant managed to look pleasantly surprised- he had been prepared to fight tooth and nail for his command, despite the amount of time he had spent cursing it.

A small part of him thought, oh crap, still Designated Driver.

'Bear in mind,' Lennart added, 'even with a bump in rank you'll be one of the most junior large ship commanders in whatever formation you end up in, there'll be a lot of men with greater seniority and smaller ships just waiting for you to cock something up. You can expect professional jealousy, and with the crew you have on that thing, your enemies probably will find a lot of opportunities to embarrass you. You need to get them to settle down and shape up. Voracious was hit and moderately badly, she'll be going in for repair; that gives you some time to work them up before it becomes of critical importance again.'

'Commander Falldess, you haven't unpacked yet, have you?'

'No…' she said, questioning, half hoping and half fearing what he was going to come out with.

'Good, don't. Take your pick of the current crew of Hialaya, Commander Carcovaan's going to get that ship back, and you are going to the first available Spoliator or Arrogant-class large light destroyer that gets attached to the sector fleet. That should suit, enough speed to go and find trouble, enough firepower and durability to cope with the kind of trouble you keep finding,' he said, with a wry grin.

'Thank you, Sir,' she said, bouncing with enthusiasm.

Speaking of which. Delvran.'

'Yes?' he raised his head. Lennart was sure his hair was greyer and he had more wrinkles than a month ago.

'In your opinion, is Dynamic worth the effort it would take to bring her back to operational capability?' Lennart asked, carefully. The one thing he could not do was actually admit how bad he felt about this. His former exec had deserved better and been given crap, and to have done as much as he had - to have achieved anything at all with that worthless crew - had been a real achievement. Arguably, the entire situation had been Lennart's fault.

'If she is to be manned by her present complement,' Dordd said difficultly, as if the words were searing his throat on the way up, 'no.' He was torn between wanting to make something of the ship, wanting to kick and drag and force them into some kind of semblance of order, to work on them - and wanting never to have to have anything to do with them ever again.

'What about her present commanding officer?' Lennart asked him.

'Are you demanding that I pass judgement on myself?' Dordd replied, angrily.

'No, I think you already have, and you passed sentence too soon,' Lennart snapped back. 'You should never have been assigned to that ship, and that ship should never had been assigned to that position - and before you commit suicide by saying what you want to, I know exactly how much of that was my responsibility,' Lennart admitted.

'The Starfleet is often a harsh service,' Dordd said, sounding like a mere platitude, but actually as close as he could come to calling Lennart a bastard and still remain within the bounds of official acceptability.

'Remember poor Velkar Kariid?' Lennart said, deliberately going off at a tangent to break an increasingly grim train of thought.

'Are you suggesting that as a potential solution?' Dordd asked.

'No, just pointing out that things could be worse,' Lennart said, although that may not have been reassuring.

'Who?' Falldess whispered to Caliphant, sitting next to her.

'Not quite ancient history,' Lennart who had overheard filled in the blank, 'he was deputy chief gunnery officer on Guarlara at second Coruscant. After the Cloister Coup, service with the open circle fleet turned from the grand prize into the professional kiss of death - we were replenishing at the time, just happened to get dragged into the maelstrom along with them. Kariid was posted as exec to a frigate initially out in the Rishi Maze that, as far as I can tell, didn't actually exist - but the BoSS bastards kept the joke up.  
'Whenever he got to where his nonexistent assignment was supposed to be, it wasn't there - transferred to a different command, running silent on deep range patrol, in dock for repairs and temporarily disestablished, always some excuse. They ran him ragged chasing around the galaxy after that phantom ship, station to station, assignment to assignment - eventually he went insane, bankrupt or, as far as I recall, both. So I'm not kidding when I say, could be worse. At least your bank account's still in good order,' he added, to Dordd.

'I have every excuse, by the book, to fall on you from a great height - you know the six month rule's tradition rather than law - but only if I throw away my brain first. That was an exceptionally raw introduction to command, you deserved better than that human wreckage of a crew, and with the proper tools I'm sure you can do better. Do what you can with Dynamic for the time being. She has a low repair priority; if you can patch her up well enough to save her for the fleet, that will at least be something. You're scheduled to take command of HIMS Plenipotentiary, new construction Imperator-II class, as soon as she transfers in-sector.'

'Captain Tevar - I went through your record, your lists of promotions, commendations and punishments, as I'm sure you did mine. You're a nurturer, you take pride in improving your crew and bringing them on.'

'Fair comment,' she acknowledged, wondering where this was going.

'At what point do those people, those humans that you react in a human manner to, blur into the collective entity known as 'the ship' that it is your professional task to lead into harm's way?' Lennart asked, as if merely for information.

'Are you accusing me of being too soft-hearted?' Tevar asked, ready to defend her record.

'Exactly the opposite. Your ship took some damage in the course of the action, but the bulk of the damage and casualties at the end, closing on a crippled rebel that had every intention of going down fighting. In order to avoid being accused of being soft-hearted, you took your ship further in harm's way than was necessary, a risk that did not come off. If I wanted to punish you for that, I think I would begin by ordering you to read out your casualty list, one name at a time, face the identity and the worth of each lost man.'

'If you wanted to?' she said, knowing exactly what he meant, but choosing to ask just that.

'I'm still kicking myself over allowing Lycarin to make the same bloody mistake - it was on the tip of my tongue to have him relieved by his exec, but he managed to get himself killed too fast. That and you know the score, you know what the fleet as a whole - the centrally established doctrine is, aggression, close quarters.  
'I find that I cannot adequately criticise you without revealing myself to be a heretic, a deviant from the tactical doctrine of the Starfleet. So be it.' Lennart grinned a twisted grin.

'I'm starting to reckon the whole discipline of relentless aggression you get drummed into you at the academy, the disregard all loss, win at all costs, just go at them style properly falls into the category of lies-to-children. You know, the half truths they get fed as a makeshift until they're old and intelligent enough to grasp the real truth. I know it's a makeshift half truth, I spent four years preaching it and ten years practising the opposite,' he said, and the assembled ship commanders of the squadron recognised that he was slipping into lecturing mode. He was doing that, and he was also very possibly committing suicide. It escaped none of them that he had just described the central tactical policy of the Imperial Starfleet as somewhere between a half-truth, a makeshift and a lie.

Then again, he was still carrying a lightsabre. What was that all about? Was he not worried about authority falling on him from a great height because the Force, in its darker variety, was with him, - or was his brain too badly fried to care?

'We've just fought a medium range, high speed running battle, with loss of life on our side considering the damaged ships about twenty-eight percent, enemy casualties one hundred percent and there were ten times as many to start with.' Lennart underscored the point.  
'The ships and the crews are capable of so much more dexterity and finesse, so why is the bludgeoning, brutalist doctrine of close quarters and total commitment considered necessary? And it is considered necessary, the debate is essentially over. This is settled policy, unfortunately.  
'There are many complicated political reasons, but essentially - and I'm not talking about you - the Empire feels itself more badly threatened by the misbehaviour of its own forces than any potential enemy.  
'The issue gets sold to the Starfleet as a matter of courage and cowardice; but there is one very rarely expressed truth, that the determination, or otherwise, of spacers, petty and junior officers has never been a problem. Misbehaviour on the part of captains and admirals is the critical issue. You all know just how much of a captain's authority is contingent and intangible, a compromise between the mastery the crew think you possess and the damnably little the regulations tell you that you can get away with - that is not nitpicking, back seat driving, mindless bureaucracy. The bureaucracy may be allowed to think it is, certainly behave as if they do, but they're wrong. I'm not going to start venn diagramming, but this is the shoal that the currents of power within the Empire are carrying us towards.'

'The upper echelons of the Starfleet want commanders who will fight, where and when they're told to - for any reason or none at all. What they do not want is commanding officers who decide that an objective isn't worth fighting for, couldn't possibly justify the losses taking it would inflict. Who are capable of deciding that there might be an alternative way. They want head down, go get them murder-machines, who will not back out of a fight - however hopeless it might be, because after all, we're expendable. They can always make more.  
'What they do not want is subtlety and sophistication, no independent logic, no alternative takes on the good of the Empire. Not from people who command planet killers. The upper echelons of the imperial establishment want officers who defer to them and their judgement - people who fight when they're told, but also do not fight when they're not told. Who are obedient enough to stand and die for lack of orders, when no orders are given, who do exactly what they're told, no more, no less.  
'Consider that the death star's fighter group is officially regarded as having done the right thing by committing suicide; a midcourse interception would have been easy, and far surer than the literally last ditch effort a fragment of them did make. As an ex-civilian, I have to admit I can see their point about political control of the military, but as a spaceman it scares the crap out of me. They have good logic and a powerful practical lever on their side, their ideas flow much more naturally out of the normal concepts of naval discipline.  
'Imagine trying to lead a crew who thought they could use their own judgement on every order…' Lennart said, letting them absorb that.

'You very nearly do,' Tevar said.

'You think that's a coincidence?' Lennart said, with one eyebrow raised.

'Practical, formal, effective enforcement of authority is the positive side of the military culture of the Empire - and it shocks me a little to be admitting that,' Lennart said. 'You come to the reverse of the medal when you start asking the next obvious question. So, who is allowed to use their own judgement? We're all killers, we're all good at that, and the Empire sanctions that in spades, but at what rank and what seniority do you gain your license to think? At any rank?  
'Next disturbing question; how many ships and people have been lost, how many operations blown, by the frothing-rancor style of tactical approach? How very many more than that by the timid and terrified, caught between the fire of the enemy and the ruthless authority of their own side, hustled into making a mistake?  
'Even when we succeed, the price is often too damned high. Consider your Fist,' Lennart said to Tevar directly. 'You suffered your worst damage and your greatest loss of people when you pressed in too close to Admonisher, didn't you?'

'Yes,' Tevar said, simply. She could grasp what Lennart was chasing after, but, it was a lot to believe.

' "In accordance with the best traditions of the Imperial Starfleet"- and look what happened. The loss of men and metal that you feel as if - no, not as if, they are your own. If I added insult to injury by reprimanding you for it, the rebuilt sector fleet command would laugh - not at you, at me, for being crazy enough to think that it mattered. Success is supposed to be worth the price. Without the operational freedom to use your own judgement and haggle with death, with both hands tied behind your back so you can't fence with him - Ach, I'm getting on to one of my own hobby horses here.

'As a woman, you're already different from the majority of the Starfleet, which presents you with two possible broad paths. The first is to follow the example set by Admiral Daala, who played a finely dextrous game on paper but in the flesh, under the human responsibilities of command, became more brutal than the brutalists, more ultramontane than the ultras. She set out to beat the authoritarian, success at any price school at its own game.  
'This approach,' he said, looking at the holoimage of the mauled Fist, 'could be said to have its drawbacks. The alternative is to make use of the fact that you are different, and use that to write your own remit. Set your own standards.  
'The personal - tactical - details of how to do this veer into areas that I'm the wrong gender to advise you on, but I have found a great deal of advantage in being an eccentric, and you'd be amazed just how much subtlety you can get away with under the cover of a reputation for homicidal mania.  
'Rather more immediately, Fist took a hell of a pounding, and the repair work she needs would amount to a major refit anyway. She's going to be upgraded to what you could call an Imperator-one-and-a-half. Late model bridge tower, no neck, rising direct from the superstructure, combined set ring and paddle deflectors, and you lost two turrets - I'm going to steal another two from you, replace your missing four with octuple 32's, that should be tactically interesting. You personally, I've recommended you be detached to a territorial - district - command while you wait for your ship to be rebuilt.'

That was interesting. District was the next level beneath subsector, and in this smaller sector that amounted to twelve major, six hundred and fifty minor worlds and the space between them, and authority over their local patrol forces, planetary defences, sector fleet elements that entered her territory. It involved few major combat elements, but a wide and varied spectrum of authority and responsibility. Next to having her ship in working order now, it was as good as she could reasonably hope for. It was also usually a Commodore's command.

'Are you recommending me for promotion to flag rank?' she said, not quite believing.

'More and less than that,' Lennart said. 'Before the law, I cannot promote you or anyone greater to a rank than I myself hold. I'm not entirely certain why I'm still a Captain of the Line, for that matter. Also, all things are subject to confirmation - or disapproval - by higher command. The most I can do is put you into a position where you can expect to screen for promotion.  
'Realistically - Voracious and Hialaya are going to split the credit for Mon Evarra, with an assist to Dynamic; everybody gets to paint up the outline of One and Indivisible and fill in the bits they were responsible for. Reiver, the credit is going to go eighty-twenty Fist and Dynamic, and Admonisher, five percent Hialaya, Dynamic and Voracious, fifteen Fist, the rest Black Prince.  
'Comparing that to the performance of the rest of the sector group, I think I can promise that anyone who was here, with the regional support group that broke the back of the problem, is going to rise far and fast.  
'So what does rank have to do with real military quality?

'Neither option works, for me. The blind obedience of official Imperial policy, the culture of aggression the Starfleet wants us to belong to - where's dexterity? Where's skill? Where's keeping your people in one piece? Survival is not incompatible with victory, and effectiveness does not follow out of either side of the false dichotomy.  
'Galactic Spirit, I'm in danger of ending on a moral. Still, better that than an immoral…I'm still waiting to be officially weighed in the balance myself, over what I - we - had to do to Kor Alric. To commit such an enormity, I would have had to be on very firm ground, and I believe I was; but he tried to convince me to side with him, and in the process of doing so told me quite a lot about how the Empire really functions, behind the scenes. It was a deeply disturbing experience, and pride in professionalism is the strongest psychic anchor I have at the moment, I suppose I'm projecting some of that on to you.  
'Not so much what he actually had to say, but that the Empire could trust such a being and raise him to power - monstrous. Anyway, my personal reactions are my problem.'

'Captain Tevar, based on your treatment of your crew, I think you are capable of walking that professional tightrope. Reaching out for the sort of mobile yet committed, fast moving style of action Black Prince favours.  
'You didn't, you played it by the book and it cost you and your ship dearly. Bear that in mind - you can do better than that, and I put you forward because I expect you to. Obviously, I want you all to follow my example - more personally than that, I want to set an example worth following. Although not necessarily in the realm of politics. If you get hold of the reports I filed on you, you will see that they're barely civil, full of faint praise. Unfriendly bordering on harsh, and with the purpose of sparing you all from the fate of Velkar Kariid.  
'There is going to be a lot of political fallout, and the further away from me you're standing when it lands, the better. I doubt whether my expressing a good opinion of you would constitute an advantage.  
'There's going to be a full engineering detachment through, establishing a deepdock here - they're already well begun - and using that to refurbish the planetary yards. The repair and refitting of most of the damaged ships will be done there, Fist will be shipped by tender to Corellian Engineering - same place Black Prince is bound for refit.

'There, I face the inquisition, and find out what's waiting for me, while you get to carry on with setting this sector back to rights. You're lucky; you still have enough latitude to be certain that you're fighting in a just cause.'


End file.
